Serendipity plays a role. A while back, out of the blue, I received an email from an eBird reviewer questioning a bird sighting on a checklist from 2015. The issue was that I had reported Lesser Flamingo but the photo I posted was a Greater Flamingo. This turned out to be correct. Checking my photo database revealed that I had plenty of Lesser Flamingo shots from the day in question, so I inserted one and also added Greater Flamingo to my Tanzania life list. All good so far.

But while wandering down memory lane I noticed that one of the birds from that day did not have a species name tag. A quick check of my Birds of Kenya and Northern Tanzania guide should have produced a result, but there was nothing within that resembled this bird.

In olden times this would have remained a mystery, but now we have web 2.0 and, specifically, a Facebook site run by the American Birding Association called What’s This Bird. The page allows people to post bird photos and ask for identification. This is useful for people new to birding, though curmudgeons like me note the prevalence of standard backyard birds and grouse about said people being too lazy to look in a field guide. But I digress.

The page is mainly filled with photos of North American birds but occasionally others creep in. For example I was happy to be able to contribute an ID when someone posted a photo of a Dolphin Gull in the Southern Ocean. So I posted the mystery bird with a date and location and then moved on with my life.

And then yesterday a fellow from Denmark suggested Black-lored Cisticola. Oddly enough this species is not in my field guide but a quick check of eBird revealed that this was my bird. Hosanna! Not just a mystery solved, but a new life bird! Thank you Per Larsen, the ABA, and the internet super roadway thingy.

The Black-lored Cisticola, it emerges, is found in Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia, but typically only in the south of Tanzania so it was out of scope for my field guide.

It, along with about 160 Cisticola species, belongs to the family Cisticolidae. The family also includes prinias and tailorbirds so the Black-lored Cisticola is the vanguard of a small flood of cisticola types soon the enter the Bird of the Day pantheon.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.