Colours of Wildlife: White-Winged Flufftails
Created | Updated Jun 3, 2018
White-Winged Flufftails
Willem is a wildlife artist based in South Africa. He says "My aim is simply to express the beauty and wonder that is in Nature, and to heighten people's appreciation of plants, animals and the wilderness. Not everything I paint is African! Though I've never been there, I'm also fascinated by Asia and I've done paintings of Asian rhinos and birds as well. I may in future do some of European, Australian and American species too. I'm fascinated by wild things from all over the world! I mainly paint in watercolours. . . but actually many media including 'digital' paintings with the computer!"
What you see here is something very, very few people have ever seen in the wild. I haven't seen any myself, yet. These are White-winged Flufftails, Sarothrura ayresi. They're some of the rarest and most threatened of birds in South Africa, and indeed Africa. The species is only known to breed in Ethiopia and South Africa, and indeed, it was only confirmed as breeding in South Africa in the past year, using camera traps which recorded a female with three chicks. Everywhere that they occur, they face severe threats, basically the destruction, alteration and degradation of their wetland habitats. It is estimated that as few as 250 individuals of this species may exist in the entire world.
Chicks of the Wetlands
So what are flufftails, exactly? Their English names note the rather fluffy feathers of their short tails. In Afrikaans we call them 'vleikuikens' or 'chicks of the marshes/wetlands'. They're about the size of newly hatched chickens – the white-winged flufftail is the smallest species, measuring up to 15 cm/6" in total length, and weighing just about 30 g/1 oz. Flufftails only occur in Africa and Madagascar. All of them are elusive birds frequenting dense vegetation such as wetlands, rank grasses and forest edges. They also look similar, with dark feathers on their dumpy bodies, and often brighter reddish-brown on their heads, breasts and/or tails. Most also have light spotting or streaking. Females are typically rather duller-coloured than males. They live by eating leaves and seeds of marsh plants as well as catching small aquatic invertebrate critters and tiny fish and tadpoles. They were once considered members of the Rallidae, the rail/crake/coot/moorhen/gallinule family, being similar to small crakes in many ways, but today they're considered as constituting their own family, being genetically distinct. Flufftails are usually only recorded and identified by their calls. Most species have far-carrying, hooting calls, much deeper than one would imagine for such small birds. Sadly, we don't yet know what the white-winged flufftail's call sounds like. If we did, it would help us very much because then it might be possible to establish their presence in a place without needing to physically see them.
This flufftail has been seen by humans only a handful of times. Sometimes a dead specimen is found, and once a bird was brought in by someone's pet cat. The best way of actually glimpsing one, is by flushing it in its wetland habitat. If approached, birds will typically creep into dense vegetation and then sit tight. It's almost impossible to see them if they do that, and they will not budge until you're almost upon them. Sometimes not even then, as one has sadly been collected after a porter trod on it. But most of the time the bird will fly out just before you're on it. Flufftails in general can be recognized when flushed by their tiny size, dark colour and rather weak flight. That helps you say that what you flushed was a flufftail, but not which flufftail species it was, since they all look rather similar and a short glimpse of a bird flying away from you before diving into dense cover hardly allows you a detailed inspection. But in the case of the white-winged flufftail, if you flush it, you know for sure what it is, because it is the only flufftail species that has the white secondary flight feathers, showing up as a clearly visible white panel in its wings as it flies.
Even so, white-winged flufftails are very hard to ever see. But it also helps now that we know where they breed. The principal breeding site we know of is at Berga in Ethiopia, a patch of wetland that is flooded during the rainy season, making excellent living conditions for the flufftails: rather short but dense cover of grasses and sedges, and very shallow water over the ground. Unfortunately this wetland region is only a few square kilometres in extent and is still being encroached on by ever-growing numbers of cattle, while people cut grass from it for an important coffee ceremony. But public awareness campaigns are in effect. A few more wetlands in Ethiopia may sustain small breeding populations, but this hasn't yet been confirmed. In South Africa, the main region they're found is the high-altitude perennial marshes in the Dullstroom area, the principal ones being at Middelpunt and Wakkerstroom. But even here there's only about 3.9 square kilometres of suitable habitat in total. In the whole world there's therefore less than 10 square kilometres/about 4 square miles of suitable habitat where these flufftails live and breed!
It's strange that these flufftails have been found in South Africa, and in Ethiopia, but not in between (apart from a tiny number of records for Zimbabwe, which is next door to South Africa). Still the Ethiopian birds look just like the ones in South Africa. Are they the same species? Are they different subspecies forming isolated populations? Or are they in fact just one population – with the birds from Ethiopia migrating to South Africa and back? For a while it was thought that they were migrants, since the species was known to breed in Ethiopia but not in South Africa. But now that the birds are known to breed in South Africa, it may be that the two populations are indeed distinct and resident. But genetic analysis shows that the Ethiopian and South African birds are indeed very much alike, certainly the same species, and perhaps still connected by some kind of migration. It is likely that the species used to be much more abundant and widespread, but has dwindled to the point where all the linking populations between South Africa and Ethiopia have now disappeared, leaving those two widely separated populations. But it would be very interesting if migration can be proved, since flufftails hardly seem to be strong fliers, and the distance between their haunts in South Africa and Ethiopia is over 4 000 km/2500 miles.
So where does that leave our little flufftails? For the present they're extremely endangered; even if their remaining habitat as it is can be totally protected and safeguarded, there's so little left that it would be difficult to build back the flufftail population. A small population is always very vulnerable. Not enough individuals means not much genetic variation, leaving them susceptible to diseases. Also, the vagaries of climate might alter some or all of the habitat and make it no longer suitable. One possibility would be to reclaim certain regions, for instance taking farmland or plantations of trees or sugarcane that used to be marshland the flufftails could have lived and bred in and converting them back to their original state. This is a rather big project, but not impossible. If you think about how little these tiny birds need, an additional few square kilometres might do wonders.
Another project that's being considered, is captive breeding of these flufftails. The snag is that we still don't know how to breed flufftails! One plan was to take some of the much more common red-breasted flufftails and breed them in captivity to find out just what their needs are; once this has been mastered, the same can then be tried with the white-winged flufftails, removing a few eggs from nests in their breeding colonies, and then raising the chicks in a controlled situation. This is a rather risky proposition but it just might work, and if we have a decent population of birds in captivity, the species at least can survive even if all of their natural habitat is destroyed. And it just might be possible then to one day re-create their habitat and reintroduce them into the wild. Even if the wild habitat is protected, and remains, it might still be a good insurance policy to have a significant and safeguarded 'captive' population. We shall have to see.
Whatever the case, white-winged flufftails are charming little birds about which we still know very, very little, and it will be a sad day if Africa loses the few that it has.
