Of beautiful Wattles and Wattle-eyes: Brown-throated Wattle-eye (Uganda)

A small little bird that impressed everyone there in Uganda was a Wattle-eye. Though there are five species of the birds in East Africa - we could see only one. My book on birds of East Africa describes the birds as medium sized, fly-catcher like and several of them named after the females plumages and not males. 

The birds we saw were the Brown-throated Wattle-eye, one of the common birds there. We saw a pair but the male was more fidgety and did not give too good an opportunity to photograph but the female was more patient and gave a few but good opportunity to observe and shoot. The bird like described in the book was around the average 13 cm. This is also one of the biggish birds with others being somewhat smaller than this.The bird has been listed as common and we saw the birds in the fringe area of Mpanga forestry reserve.

The female and the Dark Chestnut Brown neck that gives the bird its name

Brown-throated Wattle-eye (Female)

I am including this picture as it gives a great view of the potruding wattles over the eyes.

The birds were great sport in the sense that they sang out to each other and the singing birds were as great to hear as they were to see. I am embedding the sound from Xeno-canto for your listening pleasure.