Tractrac Chat

About the Tractrac Chat

The tractrac chat (Emarginata tractrac) is a small passerine bird of the Old World flycatcher family Muscicapidae. It is a common resident breeder in southernmost Angola, western Namibia and western South Africa. Its habitat is Karoo and desert scrub, hummock dunes and gravel plains.

The tractrac chat was illustrated and described by the French naturalist François Levaillant in Volume 4 of his Histoire naturelle des oiseaux d'Afrique published in 1805. He named the bird, "Le tractrac", an onomatopoeia based on its call. The first formal description of the tractrac chat was by the English publisher John Wilkes in 1817 under the binomial name Motacilla tractrac. The species was subsequently placed in the genus Cercomela introduced by Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1856. It was moved to its current genus, Emarginata, after molecular phylogenetic studies published in 2010 and 2012 found that Cercomela was polyphyletic.

There are 5 subspecies: E. t. hoeschi (Niethammer, 1955) – southwestern Angola and northwestern Namibia E. t. albicans (Wahlberg, 1855) – western Namibia E. t. barlowi (Roberts, 1937) – southern Namibia E. t. nebulosa (Clancey, 1962) – southwestern Namibia

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