Songbird that Sounds Like a Frog

Last week we went looking for seabirds. This week we move away from the seaside and move inland to look for a songbird.

This songbird tends to live on the ground and is quite difficult to observe and find. They love the forest shade, foraging in the leaf litter of the forest floor.1 They have special bright purple sacks on their necks that they can inflate when displaying, giving them a very colorful appearance. Their song is a long whistle vaguely resembling microphone feedback. However, if you bother it, its call will change to sound more frog-like.

Has anyone figured it out yet? This week is a tough one, as there is not much information available on this kind. This week’s kind is the Eupetidae, the Malaysian rail-babbler. These brown birds are found only in Southeast Asia. Next week we travel to Africa, again looking for birds, but these will be much easier to find.

Try out this fun crossword puzzle!

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Clue

Your clue for the week is:

This bird gets its name from its distinctive head ornament. The eight species of this kind are highly social and noisy, and many are colonial.

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Footnotes

1. Knud A. Jonsson, Jon Fjeldsa, Per G.P. Ericson, and Martin Irestedt, “Systematic placement of an enigmatic Southeast Asian taxon Eupetes macrocerus and implications for the biogeography of a main songbird radiation, the Passerida.” Biology Letters 3, no. 3 (2007), 323-326.