Blended Family

Chestnut-backed Sparrow-Lark.

- Pete Hancock, Mark Muller and Ken Oake

CHESTNUT-BACKED Sparrow-Larks Eremopterix leucotis are rather uninteresting little birds – or so we thought before there was an influx of them into the Kukale Pan area near Maun, Botswana, in mid-2016 following good late rains. Although Warwick Tarboton’s authoritative book Roberts Nests and Eggs of Southern African Birds notes that this species can breed in any month of the year, it was nevertheless a surprise when Ken Oake spotted a recently fledged juvenile being fed by an adult male in the middle of winter. This prompted us to search for nests, and finding them in turn opened up to us the fascinating world of the sparrow-lark.

KUKALE PAN is a typical Kalahari pan, roughly circular in shape and unrelentingly flat. In winter it is a dry, desolate dust bowl, the nutritious annual grasses having been grazed to the ground through heavy livestock pressure. It was onto this bleak scene that the sparrow larks descended.

Sparrow-larks, also known as finchlarks, are not closely related to either sparrows or finches, although they bear some resemblance to both. They are members of the lark family and all three southern African species belong to the genus Eremopterix (Greek for desert wing/desert bird). They differ from other larks by, among other things, being strongly sexually dimorphic. The black or pied males are quite attractive and easily identified, the females less so.

We knew from various sources that sparrow-larks nest on the ground like other members of the lark family, making a grass-lined bowl sunken below the level of the surroundings and usually situated on the shaded side of a grass tuft or small herb. Nevertheless, our quest seemed like a search for the proverbial needle in a haystack, even with the dearth of vegetation on the 75-hectare pan. However, once we found the first nest, others followed and the account below is a summary of the sparrow-lark’s breeding cycle.