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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MacNara" data-source="post: 3499451" data-attributes="member: 23290">Hi again Michael and Tom.I'm fine with everything Tom says. He's much more knowledgeable than me. C1 he identifies as Buffy Pipit. I was going to say that Plain-backed Pipit looked good to me. I don't think the breast streaking is dark enough for Grassland or Long-billed, and what we can see of the back looks not to be very streaked. But the book says that the godsoni ssp of Plain 'is sometimes considered a ssp of Buffy', so maybe this is what Tom means. Official Buffy doesn't occur anywhere near the Mara. (Unless godsoni has officially been put into Buffy, which I am not aware of.)I'd like to pick up on the two that Tom left, with a tentative opinion.I think the sunbird in B5 is probably Marico. It clear that the bird is changing to adult colouring, and that it will have green and/or purple on the chest and green on the upper back. It has a short tail. Just on these features, given that it's in the Mara, we are restricted to Marico, Purple-banded (maybe), Variable and Collared.The bill in the photo is very robust, so Collared is definitely out (although I've never actually seen this bird myself). I think the bill is too robust for P-B and Variable also. In any case, Variable would be more yellow in the area of the belly that we can see, I think. And I think P-B is only along the shore of Lake Victoria, and not inside the Mara itself. So I think it's Marico, with Variable as the back-up choice. The colouration and patterning (light eyebrow) also fit with Marico.For the flying bird in B4, it seems that it has a black necklace and a reasonably long tail, neither of which fit Wing-snapping Cisticola (the necklace doesn't fit any cisticola, I think). Also Wing-snapping is only peripherally in the Mara at all if BofEA's map is correct. Are you sure it's a cisticola? Might it not be Flappet Lark which also makes these noises? It's true that it's a bit light in colouration for the lark, and the head doesn't look very lark-like, though it's difficult to judge the 'real' shape from this photo, so this comment is just tentative.</blockquote>

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