Taita Apalis

Appearance

This is a medium–sized arboreal warbler at 14–16 cm (5.5–6.3 in) long and 10–12 g (0.35–0.42 oz) in weight with dark grey upperparts slightly darker shade on wings and tail. The throat and breast is black and the underparts are white to off-white.

Range and habitat

The Taita apalis is a bird in the family Cisticolidae that is endemic to the Taita Hills in Kenya. Its natural habitat is subtropical or tropical moist montane forest. It is threatened by habitat loss.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Habits

Perching birds hold with three toes forward and one back. A named island starling or leafbird in this catalog is a wild population, not a cage type.

In crisis

The population is currently estimated at 300–650 mature individuals though a survey in 2009–2010 suggests the species has suffered a severe population decline in extent of its habitat and its population may now be as low as 60–130 individuals. Even though little is known about this population crash as illegal logging and disturbance in the taita hills have been significantly reduced. The International Union for Conservation of Nature considers this species to be critically endangered due to its tiny occupied range of 1.5 km2 (0.58 sq mi) that is severely fragmented.

Taita Apalis is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Taita Apalis, Wikidata item Q1513955. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.