Mhow: Colonel clicks Brown rock chat

Mhow (Madhya Pradesh): The brown rock chat which is also called Indian chat was recently captured by retired Colonel and an amateur lens man Colomel Dhiraj Shah when the bird was insects.

Shah said the bird belong to the species of the Muscicapidae and it is found mainly in old buildings and rocky areas northern and central India.

It resembles a female Indian robin but lacks the reddish vent and differs in posture and behaviour besides being larger in structure. In flight, it bears some resemblance to thrushes and redstarts and it feeds on insects, captured mainly on the ground. It was formerly placed as the sole species in the genus Cercomela but is now included with the wheatears in the genus Oenanthe.

Edward Blyth described the species in the binomial- Saxicola Fusca in 1851 based on a specimen from Mathura. This bird is uniformly brown with the wings and tail of a slightly darker shade. The brown on the undersides grades into a dark grey-brown vent. The beak is slender and is slightly curved at the tip. The second primary is the longest and the tail is rounded.

Shah said the species is nearly endemic to India, distributed north of the Narmada, west to Gujarat (mainly Kutch but extending south) and east to Bengal bordered on the north by the Himalayas where it is found up to about 1,300 m altitude in the foothills. Its distribution extends into northern Pakistan west to the Chenab River.