Profile
In flight
Songbirds
White-necked Rockfowl
Picathartes gymnocephalus
- epic
- 32 km/h
- Vulnerable
Bald yellow head, leaps along rainforest boulders, nests under jungle overhangs. Looks like a bird from a different planet.
- Population
- 2,500-9,999 mature individuals, decreasing
- Habitat
- Rocky, hilly primary and mature secondary lowland forest (forest clearings, gallery forest) up to ~800 m elevation, always near flowing streams/rivers and rock outcrops (inselbergs) with caves or overhangs used for nesting
- Fun fact
- The White-necked Rockfowl has a bald, bright-yellow-and-black head and builds mud nests plastered directly onto vertical cave and cliff walls, often in small colonies (commonly cited as 2-5 pairs); it is also known to occasionally commit infanticide against neighboring pairs' chicks within a colony.
- Range
- West Africa: fragmented, patchy populations across Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, and Ghana (~391,000 km² total range across ~32 known/23 key sites)
- Diet
- Ground-foraging invertivore — cockroach larvae, grasshoppers, earwigs, ants, beetles, termites, millipedes, centipedes, snails and earthworms, often following Dorylus army-ant swarms to catch flushed prey; parents feed chicks mostly vertebrates such as small frogs and lizards
- Size
- 0.4 m
- Lifespan
- 13 years
