Greeting all,
Last Thursday (12th Nov) while at Namanga Hill on a Kenya Bird Map expedition, we encountered a black Accipiter that gave us a bit of a hard time to ID. It was clearly a dark morph of something..
Too small to be Great Sparrowhawk plus it had no white on the throat. I don't think it was a Gabar as it had no white on the upper tail coverts in flight (though I'm not sure if the dark morph of the species should have the white). Plus it seemed a bit large for a Gabar. The cere was yellowish and legs yellowish-orange so that further rules out the Gabar. The orange of the legs seemed too much for African Goshawk.
None of us in the group got a good look at the eyes. A strange thing about it was that it had a few white spots in the closed right wing. Maybe not fully adult? It didn't let us get close enough for me to get a good photo with my small camera. In the end we recorded it as Ovambo Sparrowhawk, though still with a little doubt due to the rarity of the species in Kenya. We never saw the white 'arrowhead' marks in the tail, probably due to the not so good view we got of it.The Zimmerman et al. guidebook says that among the most recent reliable records of the species are from near Namanga so our location seemed appropriate. We were also in a wooded habitat so that's also appropriate for Ovambo. By elimination and the evidence at hand, I can see no other species that fits.
I've attached the poor quality photos that I managed to get before the bird took off in case someone might notice something significant.
Regards,
Sidney