Dear Fleur and all others. This is certainly a most interesting observation by Fleur and others with her at the time.

The Lesser Blue-eared Starling has two very distinct populations: a northern one in northwest Kenya, often occurring in flocks around the Kongelai Escarpment, and a southern one in the miombo woodlands of Tanzania which comes north to the Pangani - Tanga area, and Van Someren’s collectors did collect a couple of specimens back in the 1920’s from the Vanga / Mombasa area.

The southern bird has been considered a separate species (Miombo Blue-eared Starling) by some authors, despite comments by the Dowsett’s that calls of the northern and southern birds are identical.

Morphologically there is one major difference between northern and southern birds, and it occurs in the juveniles, with juvenile northern birds being buffy-brown below, while those of the southern population are distinctly all tawny-brown on the underparts.

In Birds of Africa Volume 6 there is a mention of southern birds being recorded in coastal lowlands north to Vanga, Mombasa and near Malindi. Now Vanga and Mombasa refer to the Van Someone days, but the “near Malindi” reference appears to refer to the map in Hall & Moreau (1970) Atlas of African Passerine birds where both Lesser and Greater are shown for what appears to be the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest, and which must be linked to a specimen in Tring (though I was not aware of it).

There seems no doubt as to what Fleur and her colleagues were seeing at Dakatcha, and this is surely worth following up.
It maybe that some years these birds have been overlooked among the southern Greater Blue-eared (sycobius) that do occur annually in the coastal lowlands north to Kilifi and Malindi. Certainly worth checking out all flocks of Greater Blue-eared at the coast in the future.

Wonder if there are any e-bird records from the coast worth following up ??

Don Turner