Grey-headed Canary-Flycatcher Culicicapa ceylonensis 方尾鶲
Category I. Common winter visitor and passage migrant to forested areas, mainly October to March.
IDENTIFICATION
Dec. 2005, John and Jemi Holmes.
12-13 cm. Brightly-coloured with strong contrast of grey of head, throat and upper chest with bright green upperparts and yellow underparts. Fringes to flight and tail feathers also bright green. Orbital ring behind eye whitish and thick. Legs pale dull orange. Structurally large-headed and short-legged.
VOCALISATIONS
Distinctive song consists of 3-5 fairly high-pitched notes in a simple rhythm.
Calls include a short ‘tip’ uttered singly or run together as a trill, especially when excited or alarmed.
DISTRIBUTION & HABITAT PREFERENCE
Favoured wintering sites are areas of mature forest such as those on the Tai Mo Shan massif, where densities are highest. Migrants occur in widespread wooded locations, including Po Toi where the extreme dates of occurrence are 8 October and 26 April, concentrated in the final three months of the year.
OCCURRENCE
The earliest record is of one at Ho Man Tin on 28 September 2016, with the next earliest on 7 October 2018. It remains rare until the third week of October, after which there is a steady increase in reported numbers to a peak from the third week of November to mid-December (Figure 1). This peak no doubt reflects the fact some birds are passing through HK, but it may also reflect the greater frequency of vocalising in the early winter period.
Numbers recorded in midwinter are somewhat lower, and a further decline occurs after the third week of January, which appears to be when wintering birds begin to leave. It is rare after the third week of March, and the latest record in spring concerns one on Po Toi on 26 April 2015. Records typically concern one to five birds, with the highest count reported being 11 at Shing Mun on 11 February 2007. Numbers tend to vary considerably each winter.
Macfarlane and Macdonald (1966) considered Grey-headed Canary-flycatcher to be an occasional visitor, possibly a regular winter visitor in very small numbers. This species may be increasing with, for example, the first records from Cheung Chau and Mai Po coming in 1990 and 1996 respectively.
BEHAVIOUR, FORAGING & DIET
Restless and vocal in the forest habitat it frequents, it is usually heard before it is seen. When flycatching may return to the same perch a number of times or fly to a new perch each time.
RANGE & SYSTEMATICS
Widespread Asian species occurring from northern Afghanistan through the Himalayas to west and south China and south through much of the Indian subcontinent, Indochina and peninsula Malaysia to the Greater and Lesser Sundas; northern populations are migratory (Clement 2020). In China a summer visitor to areas south of a line from southeast Tibet to the Bay of Bohai, and resident in southern Tibet, and southern coastal provinces (Liu and Chen 2020). The pattern of occurrence in HK indicates that along the coast it is not resident.
The taxon occurring here is C. c. calochrysea, which occurs from the Himalayas east to China and south to north and central Indochina. C. c. antioxantha occurs to the south as far as Bali, while the nominate occurs in southwest India and Sri Lanka. The remaining two subspecies are island forms in the Lesser Sundas.
CONSERVATION STATUS
IUCN: Least Concern. Population trend stable.
Figure 1.
Clement, P. (2020). Gray-headed Canary-Flycatcher (Culicicapa ceylonensis), version 1.0. In Birds of the World (J. del Hoyo, A. Elliott, J. Sargatal, D. A. Christie, and E. de Juana, Editors). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.gyhcaf1.01
Liu, Y. and Chen, Y. H. (eds) (2020). The CNG Field Guide to the Birds of China (in Chinese). Hunan Science and Technology Publication House, Changsha.
Macfarlane, A. M. and A. D. Macdonald, revised by Caunter, J. R. L. and A. M. Macfarlane (1966). An Annotated Check-list of the Birds of Hong Kong. Hong Kong Bird Watching Society, Hong Kong.
