Speckled Mousebird (Colius striatus)
About the Speckled Mousebird
The speckled mousebird (Colius striatus) is the largest species of mousebird, as well as one of the most common. It is found throughout most of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa. The speckled mousebird was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with the mousebirds in the genus Colius and coined the binomial name Colius striatus. Gmelin based his description on the "Coliou rayé" that had been described in 1778 by the French polymath Comte de Buffon from a specimen that had been collected near the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. Seventeen subspecies are recognised:
A real field recording of the Speckled Mousebird. Press play and focus on the rhythm and pitch of each phrase.
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Our streaming copies are mirrored from the original xeno-canto file and transcoded to 96 kbps mono — a modification, so we note it here; the licence for each recording is named in its credit below.
1 recording on this page · licensed CC BY-SA ×1 · mirrored on this server, free for commercial reuse · recorded in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Gabon, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa and elsewhere · xeno-canto lists 105 recordings for this species in total.
Similar species
- White-backed MousebirdColius coliusprofile
- White-headed MousebirdColius leucocephalusrecording
Species grouped by shared genus, family and range.