| It
is a very distinctive bird. The
sexes are different in colouring but both have distinctive yellow legs.
The female’s belly is black and the neck and head is barred with
black and pale rufous colourings. Her
lower chest and behind the ear-coverts are white.
The female is often confused with the Black Bellied Korhaan (Eupodotis
melanogaster). |
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Birds can be found
from as far down as Cape Town all the way up the West coast to Ovamboland
and into Zimbabwe, the Northern Province, Orange Free State and parts of
the Karoo. They do not occur
east of the Drakensberg.
They are a
common species, found in a variety of habitats, from coastal sand-dunes to
the grassy plains of the highveld. Males
are extremely noisy and conspicuous, but females are correspondingly shy,
unobtrusive and difficult to spot. In
the breeding season, mails fly around at a height of about fifteen metres
uttering their characteristic raucous “krracker, krracker” call.
Their feet dangle down after they've taken to the air and they then
"parachute" back to the ground.
They repeat this as part of their mating ritual.
The nest is merely
a scrape in the ground, sometimes lines with a little grass and extremely
difficult to find due to the watchfulness of the male and the
secretiveness of the female.
One or 2 eggs are
laid between August and October in the Cape and October to February
further north. The eggs are
olive-green and brown in colour and spotted and blotched with brown and
purple. |
