Karoo Prinia

About the Karoo Prinia

The Karoo prinia or spotted prinia (Prinia maculosa) is a small passerine bird. It is a resident breeder in South Africa, Lesotho and far southern Namibia. It is a species found in karoo scrub, fynbos and bracken-covered slopes in semi-desert and mountains. The former eastern subspecies P. m. hypoxantha is now usually considered to be a separate species, the Drakensberg prinia, P. hypoxantha.

The Karoo prinia was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1779 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle, which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Montacilla maculosa in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. Buffon believed that his specimen had come from the Cape of Good Hope. The type locality was changed to Swellendam, in South Africa, by Phillip Clancey in 1963. The Karoo prinia is now placed in the... Wikipedia →