Description
The Fairy Flycatcher is 11–12 cm in length. The adult is pale grey above with a black mask through the eye and a white supercilium. The wings are black with a long white stripe, and the long black tail has white sides. The throat is white, the breast is pale grey, and the belly is white with a pinkish-grey wash to its centre. The sexes are alike, but the juvenile is browner than the adult. The eye is brown and the bill and legs are black.
Distribution and habitat
Endemic to southern Africa, with the bulk of its population scattered across South Africa, excluding the lowland coastal forests of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal and extending marginally into southern Botswana and Namibia. During the breeding season it favours shrublands, such as Karoo, fynbos, thorny thickets, mountain scrub and sweet grassland. In winter it moves into more wooded habitats, including Acacia savanna, plantations and gardens.
Food
It solely eats insects, often making short sallies from a perch to hawk prey aerially. It also joins mixed species foraging flocks, and it may glean insects from flowerheads. The following food items have been recorded in its diet:
Insects
Diptera (flies)
Hemiptera (bugs)
Coleoptera (beetles)
Hymenoptera (wasps, bees and ants)
spiders
Breeding
The female solely builds the nest, which is an open cup built of dry grass stems and other plant matter, such as slangbos (Stoebe), honeythorns (Lycium) and wild Asparagus. It has even been recorded using rags, rubbish and human hair, which it once attempted to pull from someones head! It is typically placed in the fork of a branch or against the trunk of a tree, especially Acacia. It may also use a dead tree stump or branch, or hiding it amongst dead aloe leaves.
Egg-laying season is year-round, but peaking from September-October.
It lays 2-4 eggs, which are incubated solely by the female for about 13-16 days.
The female mainly takes care of the chicks, who stay in the nest for about 15-17 days, after which they still fed for unknown period of time. There is one strange record of a Cape robin-chat feeding a Fairy flycatcher's chicks with beetles then hiding when the parents arrived.
Links
Biodiversity Explorer
Wikipedia