The
moorland chat (
Pinarochroa sordida), also known as the
alpine chat or
hill chat, is a species of songbird in the Old World flycatcher family. It is endemic to the eastern Afromontane. It lives at high altitudes on moors and grassland, usually above 3,400 m (11,100 ft), but can live as low as 2,100 m (6,900 ft). It has a short tail and long legs. It is bold and will approach people.
Taxonomy: The moorland chat was formally described in 1837 by the German naturalist Eduard Rüppell from a specimen collected in the Simien Mountains of northern Ethiopia. Rüppell coined the binomial name
Saxicola sordica.
The chat was discovered on Mount Elgon on the Uganda-Kenya border by Frederick Jackson. The English geographer Halford Mackinder brought back the same bird from Mount Kenya in 1899. He presented a paper on the first ascent to the Royal Geographical Society in 1900. The scientific results of his expedition were discussed in detail afterwards.
The moorland chat was usually placed in the genus
Cercomela, but molecular phylogenetic studies published in 2010 and 2012 found that the species was not closely related to birds in
Cercomela or to birds in the closely related genus
Oenanthe. The moorland chat was therefore assigned to its own monotypic genus
Pinarochroa which had been introduced by the Swedish zoologist Carl Jakob Sundevall in 1872. The genus name
Pinarochroa is derived from the Greek word
pinaros meaning "dirty" and
khroos, khroas meaning "coloured". The specific epithet
sordida is from the Latin
sordidus meaning "shabby" or "dirty".
Four subspecies are recognised:
- P. s. sordida (Rüppell, 1837) – Ethiopia
- P. s. ernesti Sharpe, 1900 – Uganda and Kenya
- P. s. olimotiensis Elliott, HFI, 1945 – Crater Highlands (north Tanzania)
- P. s. hypospodia Shelley, 1885 – Mount Kilimanjaro (north Tanzania)