Spot-throat and Akalat unblocked! Birding for montane endemics in East Africa

Spot-throat Modulatrix stictigula pressa the form found in southern Tanzania; per Louis Hansen

Soon after our arrival in Tanzania, in June 2005, I began my quest for those afro-montane endemic birds known only from the fabled evergreen forests of the Eastern Arc mountains. I soon realised that some of these birds were serious "blockers" or "Global Megas". Species among the ranks of the infamous. "Cryptic leaf-tossers" or "dips in-waiting" down on the forest floor. Or so some birders might say. Others, perhaps older and wiser, that these are indeed "among the world's master skulkers".  Indeed they could be described as international players in the world of birding's premiership league. So "tough to get" that their desirability ranks very highly. Front runners in terms of difficulty of observation in the annals of tropical forest birding. In addition they are often naturally or un-naturally rare, or at best highly localised, and typically their haunts are nowadays at least, somewhat awkward of easy human access. So, they're not "easy birds" that's for sure!

One of the more widespread of the Eastern Arc's endemic skukers is the gloriously-named Spot-throat, an ornithological enigma machine if ever there was one. Spot-throat Modulatrix stictigula and Dapplethroat Arcanator orostruthus are revered: "Two very shy and difficult to observe species of uncertain affinities". Recently it has been shown that they are basal to the Passeroidea and form a clade with the Sugarbirds which are endemic to southern Africa. They form a pair of enigmatic forest understorey 'timalid babblers' confined to the Eastern Arc of East Africa.
In distribution Spot-throat is far more widely spread than Dapplethroat - certainly you can hear them singing from the undergrowth in quite a few isolated forest patches, especially in the West Usambaras, yet like that summer flycatcher in the increasingly sterile England of today, they are in so many ways rather seldom spotted!

In the densely peopled, seriously deforested, West Usambara mountains, that part of the Eastern Arc which I happen to know best, Spot-throats are habitually searched-for, by deet-drenched, khaki-clad platoons of visiting birders, in the 'forest reserve' of Magamba. Down on the infamous "stream-side trail". They share this locale with another elusive and even rarer sylvan denizen the erithacus-like Usambara Akalat. And it was here that I fought my first battles with both species. 

A tour group assault on Spot-throat, (in this theatre of operations it's the nominate taxon: M.s.stictigula described from Mbaramo by Reichenow in 1906), typically involves a short steep stumble. One observer often sliding-down past another, then skidding-wide to clasp a tree trunk, bins swinging above, or even through, a squidgy mulch of brown - spent Croton and Podocarpus leaves. A slide down to the babbling stream itself. Here in the damp and dreich of a cathedral dim, is a forest underworld, a spot in-itself, where you could be forgiven for dreaming you're in the depths of some primeval boreal forest, so dank and dingy are the light conditions at or near the ground.

Over the past four years I have participated in a number of tours of duty delving, on such trails, into what's left of the Magamba forest. Many times I've been on an international tour, a coalition of the willing, drawn to these sticky forests from Europe, North America or South Africa, as if by feathered sirens, by the fluttering promise of avian riches. We'd go-in mob-handed - as we were wont to say - in those earlier, simpler days of jungle birding back in the 1980s, out in Indo-China. 

Oft times, all too soon in many cases, in my opinion, mikes and speakers would be fumbled into action, directions to where the bird was calling would be whispered down-the-line, typically from a foreign leader, the main man on point. Being myself a bit of a 'tekno-phobe', and a chronic sufferer from performance anxiety, I'd elect whenever possible (after indicating the birds' preferred micro-habitats here and pointing at a fallen log-and-tangle over there) to bring up the rear of the group. Someone, if you will, who'd help the aged and infirm who might otherwise not stand a cat in hell's chance of getting their bird. 

The clicking and purring would then commence. In the absence of any commercially-available recordings, of either Spot-throat or Akalat, we used do-it-yourself tapes and boot-leg compilations. Africanbirding tapes, sourced across the web (thanks to RS, EW & MC), featuring familiar even birdy, african birder's names (thanks MW). 'Book name' recordings from a somewhat earlier era, now digitalised or otherwise, these would drone or shriek or whisper, reverberate between the mighty trunks, vibrating out across the forest gloom. 

Assembled in a line, or more often huddled in a crescent, there we would stand, and then lean, then sit; or perhaps squat and then kneel if able, and we would wait. We'd wait, wait for up to an hour, or even more, wait for just a milisecond glimpse of the obscured nature of our desire. A little brown bird and a unique event. We'd wait ideally until almost everyone had had it. Or said they'd seen it. Or said that: "In all honesty that they couldn't say they hadn't!"(thanks DAS). For in the mugginess of an afrotropic forest floor conditions are seldom ideal. Eventually, surely most of us would have had, that is obtained, the merest glimpse for a tick-able shadow view. Perhaps some had "met with our bird". During those hours well spent you might almost hear a pin drop, were it not for the incessant shuffling, the stifled coughs and explosive sneezes, and various other 'faffing-sounds' made by a group of savanna primates released into the woods. Overgrown primates genuflexing, prostrating even, to an eight inch little brown bun of a bird, one who at best only scurries under arching briars or hops across the narrowest of shady gaps. Blink and you might well miss it. 

Despite hearing the deliciously powerful beefed-up Blackcap-like (Sylvia atricapilla) cadences of Spot-throat wafting-upwards as we went-down, and despite the technological superiority with which we assailed our target, seldom would we get more than this split-second glimpse of the artist himself, a shadowy figure, as he (or she - since Modulatrix is of course a female musician) ran mouse-like through the dense verticality of his/her curiously monotone, sepia world; the tangled fastness of Magamba's forest floor.

However it came to pass that on one damp afternoon in April 2007 my stereotyped view of Spot-throat was blown wide-open. I was birding with Dismas, one local lad and bird guide Martin James, (Martin could be called the Tiger Woods of Usambara birding), and a genteel Canadian couple in their mid-sixties. We'd passed a thoroughly acceptable day target-birding at Magamba; both along the sawmill trails, and somewhat less-so down the stream-side path. Quite late on that lovely misty, cloud-hidden afternoon, we were driving back to our accommodaton at Maweni Farm*.

At a certain point, not too far from Magamba, the car ran out of diesel! My customers and Martin elected to stay in the vehicle, in the dry, out of the drizzle which was now drifting in ghostly sheets across the road ahead. Poor Dismas nobley (and rightly-so) carried the can for this one; to the nearest town! Meanwhile I went for a little stroll up into a Podocarpus plantation to relax, to unwind a while.

No sooner than I'd entered the plantation - on a steep and muddy woodcutter's trail, between bright green banks of drooping understorey plants, past tangles of vines and multifarious creepers, complete with africa's finest umbelliferous Vernonias shooting-up through it - than I heard two Spot-throats singing very loudly, piercingly, beautifully, like thrushes (or indeed Blackcaps) and very close.

One sang so close that I thought: Why not?

So, I switched-on my venerable hand-held Sony TCM 'steam-driven' tape recorder and thereby obtained the simplest of recordings using only the built-in microphone.**

A brief snippet of Spot-throat song was thus secured. I decided to alter my position by a few metres in order to gain an uninterrupted view up a very narrow side-trail; a gunnel or tunnel, through the tangled understorey of the plantation. Immediately upon play-back I was utterly amazed to see a Spot-throat hop-out onto a U-shaped vine which was suspended across the track. It materialised; perched in full unimpeded view; at only four metres from my postion. We froze - both bird and man - momentarily. Slowly my bins went-up, and yet the Spot-throat stayed there, on the slowly swinging vine, and sang and sang! For the first time I was able to truly appreciate their rich tawny-coloured underparts; and to absolutely relish the blue-grey eye-ring, that famous pale orbital which stares so mockingly out of shiny white plates in our new-age regimented bird-guides. And of course that spotted throat was very hard to see, obscure even as the bird sang-out its heart!

Minutes appeared to pass ... and then I breathed. In truth this was indeed a most marvellous Modulatrix! A sore-point was cured - my Spot-throat cleared - Spot-throat had been unblocked!

 *Maweni, for the avid birder, is indeed somewhat farther from Magamba (than is e.g. Muller's Lodge) especially in the drive at dawn and dusk. It's at least an hour's journey through steep hillsides desolate of birds: see image bottom left. Yet Maweni is much nearer to the far superior forests of Mazumbai Forest Reserve and Mazumbai's rather basic yet undeniably beautiful rest house. Additionally these private forest patches are far more expertly managed by Morogoro's Sokoine University of Agriculture (see three remaining images below) than is Magamba's nationalised Forest Reserve. I highly recommend them.

**Incidentally we used to use this simple play-back technique to great effect on the Ho Chi Minh trail in Vietnam in '88 and whilst working for WCS in Lao PDR in '96 & '97; and before that, in those wild and wicked, golden lawless days, in Thailand's 'northwest' triangle way back in the mid-80s.  Thanks indeed to you Commander - CRR!