The diminutive pipit..

Anybody who has ever picked up a camera in South Africa will agree that there are less frustrating species to photograph than the diminutive Short-tailed Pipit. Locating this male, through the lens, therefore, was extraordinarily fortunate. What happened next will remain indelibly looped in my avian-highlights package for as long as I care to run the reel.

Short-tailed Pipit

The breeding season is in the austral summer. During this period male birds give in to seasonal exuberance by performing bizarre aerial displays. In-flight entertainment, however, is a limited, nasally bzeep, less extravagant perhaps, but unique nevertheless. Back on earth the landed gentry prefer short, tussocky grassland & it's in this muck that their truly furtive nature is revealed.  

Territorial males, particularly in the pre-dawn, are generally suspicious of anything bzeep & it's not too difficult to provoke a charge with an accurate rendition of bzeep; even if the bzeep is closer to mean ground level than the more socially accepted 20 m higher up.

This individual hustled through its head-high maze in which I stood less than ankle-deep. If myopia is a consequence of blur or dust in an over-sized eye, then my eyes were only truly opened when he sought vantage from the top of my boot in which my left foot resided at the time. In truth words don't do justice to the oxygen-depleted hush / rush, mine not his. Remarkable!

Short-tailed Pipit, in the sub-region, are of the nominate subspecies. Two distinct colour forms have been mooted with the paler form considered the more common. In most instances the white throat contrasts sharply with the upper, heavily-streaked, breast, usually washed yellowish in fresh plumage. The belly, in the pale phase, is generally unmarked, washed white to pale buff. The belly and throat colour, in this phase, are similar. In the darker phase the belly is buffy-brown and the throat less distinct from the upper breast. It is interesting, therefore, to see that the throat on this pale-phase individual (male) does not contrast with the upper breast as might be expected and exhibits features more readily found in the rarer dark phase.