The Science of Birds - Random Bird Thursday: A Fire-Loving Songbird Adorned with Black Oil Drops

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

In each Random Bird Thursday (RBT) episode, the goal is to highlight a bird species that probably isn't going to get featured in a full-length podcast episode. These are birds we might overlook, even though they certainly deserve some appreciation and attention. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~⚠️ SPOILER ALERT!The featured species in this episode is the Groundscraper Thrush (Turdus litsitsirupa)Groundscraper Thrush sounds: Wikimedia file and Xeno Canto recording XC347146)Support the show

Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds. I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. And hey, guess what? It's Random Bird Thursday. Random Bird Thursday episodes are relatively short and sweet. In each of them, I spotlight a bird species that probably won't get featured in a full-length podcast episode.

Because there are over 11,000 bird species in the world, Random Bird Thursday gives us a chance to celebrate one species that we might otherwise overlook. So which bird are we talking about today? Well, let's hit the random bird selector button and find out. Okay, excellent. We have the ground scraper thrush, tortoise Litsitsirupa. Yes, the ground scraper thrush, not the skyscraper thrush. That would be something else. But apparently there are such things as buildings called ground scrapers.

and they're just exactly what you'd think, just really big buildings that have very few floors, like one floor. Yeah, so that's a ground scraper. But we're talking about a bird, of course. This thrush is a bird found in Africa, and we'll talk about the distribution in a little bit. But first, let's get into what it looks like and sounds like and all of that fun stuff.

So here we go, random bird Thursday, the ground scraper thrush. This is a medium-sized songbird with kind of a thick-set body. It tends to have an upright posture, standing tall. And as it's tilted up like that, its tail does not scrape the ground because its tail is actually quite short, relatively short for a thrush. Its wings are broad, and when it's flying, when the wings are extended, there's a sort of chestnut or orange buffy color in the wing panel during flight. But in terms of size, as I said, this is a medium-sized songbird.

It's about eight to eight and a half inches long from beak to tail, which is 20 to 22 centimeters. If you know what an American Robin looks like or a Eurasian blackbird, those are both relatives of the ground scraper thrush, and they're a little bit bigger. So the ground scraper is just smaller than those two familiar species. the bill is relatively long for a thrush and it's kind of thick kind of heavy the upper part of the beak is black but towards the base it's a bit more orangey yellow and the lower part of the beak the mandible the lower mandible is also orangey yellow and has a black tip in terms of the feathers the plumage the upper parts are pretty plain kind of grayish brown and that actually gives the bird quite a bit of camouflage so if you can only see the back and the upper parts. The bird blends in with the ground with the dirt, but the underneath is actually quite strikingly patterned. They're white, but they have bold black markings. There are these

tear-drop-shaped spots that radiate outwards across the breast and the belly. And yeah, tear-drop-shaped, but maybe more like oil drop-shaped because they're black. If you have black tears, then you might want to go to the doctor. The face of this bird is quite handsome. It has a bold pattern of black and white on the face, with these vertical stripes underneath the eyes, so subocular stripes, and these black ear coverts. So pretty jazzy-looking markings on the face and on the underparts. Males and females are pretty much identical in terms of their plumage pattern, so there's no sexual dichromatism. Not surprisingly for Thrush, this bird likes to sing. It usually does that from the top of a tree or maybe tucked into the branches a

little bit. It sings mostly in the early morning around dawn. And then like many birds, it will get vocal again in the late afternoon, more towards sunset. The song is a short but sort of loud phrase with four to eight parts, these wistly, throaty notes, not too unusual for a thrush. And the song is repeated usually every three to four seconds. The species name Litsitsirupa, right? So this is Tertis Litsitserupa that actually comes from the language of the Botswana ethnic group in Southern Africa. And the word is onomatopoeic. It imitates the bird's sound. Litsitsitserupa is supposed to be representative of this bird's song. There's also a what's called a rattle call that this species makes, these kind of clicking sounds or chuckling sounds, which again,

and are somewhat similar to what other thrushes do and you might be familiar with if you've heard the sounds made by American Robbins, for example. All right, so let's go ahead and listen to the ground scraper thrush. Here's one singing. And here's another example. So this bird is called a ground scraper thrush.

So you won't be surprised to learn that it is very much a terrestrial bird. It spends a lot of time on the ground, hopping around, scraping around and fallen leaves and dead vegetation, looking for little morsels and goodies. And as it's running around, it runs and stops, and it often flicks one wing at a time when it stops. And I'm not sure anybody knows exactly why that is. Maybe the idea is to flush prey or something. But from what I've seen, the wing flicks are pretty subtle, so who knows? Like some other thrushes, this species can be fairly tame at times when it's around people. It'll hang out in gardens and picnic areas and get used to humans. So within its range, it can be a pretty familiar species. So this is a true thrush,

meaning it's in the family turdidae, T-U-R-D-I-D-A-E, Turtody. There are 194 other species in that family, and I will of course definitely do an episode on the family turtody at some point. The ground scraper thrush is in the genus, Turtus, and that genus has 105 species, including, again, the American Robin and Eurasian Blackbird. So even though we call them American Robin, Eurasian Blackbird, they're thrushes, essentially. They're in the family turdody, which is they're pretty much all thrushes. The closest relative of the ground scraper thrush is the Ethiopian thrush, Turtis Simensis. And that latter species, the Ethiopian thrush, actually used to be considered a subspecies of the ground thrush, I mean the ground scraper thrush.

And speaking of subspecies, the ground scraper thrush has three that are currently recognized, but apparently there's some debate among ornithologists, some doubts as to which of these subspecies are real or not. Remember when I did the episode on subspecies, there's a lot of gray area in how we define subspecies depending on the criteria, so this isn't too surprising. Now here is an interesting fact. This bird, the ground scraper thrush, tortoise Litsitsirupa, is sister to all other members of its genus. Now, when I say that, what does that mean? It's a sister.

It's not like a true brother-sister relationship. It's not a sibling, but we talk about sister species or sister groups in terms of broad genetic relationships. So when you have an evolutionary tree, then you're looking at all the branches, if you have two species that basically, if you trace them back, they share a common ancestor, like they're each other's closest relative, then those are sister species. In this case, the ground scraper thrush is on its own branch, and then there's another branch that it is close to that has all the other members of the genus tortoise. So when we look at an evolutionary tree and we see a relationship like that, what that tells us usually is that something like the ground scraper thrush is the most ancestral, sort of the most

ancient lineage of that group overall. So even though it's in the genus Tertus, it's the most ancient lineage within Tertus, if that makes sense. I want to say primitive sometimes, but I try not to say primitive. I try to say ancient. Primitive suggests that it's somehow not awesome. It's almost, it's not derogatory, but you know what I mean. Primitive almost suggests it's lesser somehow. So the ground scraper thrush is an ancient thrush. It's an ancient thresh. It's an ancient member of the genus turtus. Now, what ornithologists think that is that the ancestors of this thrush and its close relatives colonized Africa during the Miocene epoch when there were open habitats that kind of spread

across the landscape. Because before that, it was primarily, Africa was primarily covered in evergreen tropical forests, but then the climate dried out, those forests contracted, and more open habitats emerged. And so it seems these thrushes may have colonized during that time. So as I've been saying, this is an African species. Its distribution or its range covers a little bit of central Africa, but mostly southern Africa, a bunch of countries in southern Africa. Its habitat is open woodland, grassland, more land, and also human modified places like orchards, gardens, golf courses, picnic areas,

backyards. The common theme is that the ground scraper thrush prefers places with pretty sparse vegetation in the understory and lots of patches of bare ground.

This isn't a particularly migratory species. For the most part, its populations are resident, although it seems it sometimes undergoes partial migration or certain populations do.

They move with the seasonal patterns of rainfall. So you have dry seasons and weather. wet seasons, and these birds will move around relative to those, but not with like an annual consistency of a typical long-distance migrant. We can all rejoice about the conservation status of the ground scraper thrush because it is in the least concern category of the IUCN's red list,

meaning that there's nothing to worry about forever and ever and nothing can ever hurt the ground scraper thrush, which of course is not true, because this species does face some threats. like pretty much all birds everywhere, its habitat is under threat. In some parts of its range, the ground scraper thrush has lost habitat due to the clearing of woodland. But interestingly, in other parts of its range, it has been able to expand into new areas because of human tree planting and other human modified habitats that it likes. But overall, the species is doing okay as far as we can tell, even though habitat loss and destruction is always a concern.

What is on the menu for the ground scraper thrush? What does it eat? For the most part, this bird loves to eat invertebrate prey, things like earthworms, grasshoppers, and butterflies. But it will also eat fruit like mulberries, and at least when it comes to feeding its young, it has even been shown to eat small vertebrates that it feeds to its young, like skinks, small lizards. And remember I said that this bird has a somewhat long, heavy bill for a thrush. Well, that works well as a tool in this bird's terrestrial foraging lifestyle of going around scraping the ground with its bill, scratching through the leaf litter, flipping leaves overlooking for prey. And as I said, it prefers lots of open ground in its habitat because that's where it likes to forage. With its

upright posture and somewhat long legs, the ground scraper thrush runs, stops, looks and listens for any prey in the area. Kind of cocks its head listening for things. Interestingly, this species is really attracted to areas that have recently burned. And bushfires are pretty common in Africa. So the ground scraper thrushes will sometimes show up within 24 hours or so after a fire, and they're looking for small prey that are still thrashing around in the burned area, but after the area has cooled off a bit within those 24 hours. And sometimes these thrushes will be flying around in the air as the fires are still going,

and the ground scraper thrushes will catch insects in flight. It seems the ground-scriber thrush, like many of its relatives, is a monogamous species. For the most part, they're found in pairs during the breeding season. But there have been some cases where it seems like there's been some cooperative breeding, where maybe four adult individuals are hanging out with the same set of offspring and feeding them and whatnot. The nest is an open cup shape. It's sort of untidy and messy, made of roots, stems, twigs, and spider webs are used to bind it altogether, and there might even be some wool from mammals or dung incorporated into the

nest. The nest is positioned in the crook of a tree or a tree fork somewhere between three and 30 feet off the ground, or 1.5 to 9 meters. It seems they like to be associated with another bird species, the fork-tailed drongo, in terms of where they place their nests. And that might be because the fork-tailed drongo is highly territorial and defends an area. So if you place your nests, near a forktail drongo, you can kind of let the drongo be your watchdog and keep an eye on things, make a racket if a predator shows up. But the ground scraper thrush itself is territorial around the nest in the breeding season. Each clutch has about three eggs in it, from two to four, with an average of three. The eggs can be creamy blue or maybe greenish blue, and there are

blotches that might be reddish-brown or even kind of a purplish lilac color. Both male and female help to build the nest, to incubate the eggs, and to brood and feed the chicks. It takes a couple weeks to incubate the eggs, and then the chicks hatch out. They hatch asynchronously, meaning the eggs don't all hatch on the same day. There's a bit of a staggered hatching process. And once they're all out, they're all in the nest for maybe another two weeks, and overall they're going to get about six weeks of parental care once they've fledged and left the nest. And as far as I could see from what data I could find,

the maximum lifespan recorded for this species is only two years, which is a little surprising. Probably they live a bit longer than that, I would hope. But that's about it for what we know for the lifespan. And in fact, that's about it for what we know or what I know about the ground scraper thrush. It's really a nice-looking bird, and it seems to have a bit of charisma.

I personally have not seen one yet, so hoping to get that one on my life-lrapes. list someday. And how about you? Have you seen a ground scraper thrush in southern Africa somewhere? Let me know. My email address is Ivan at scienceofbirds.com. And hey, there you go. Short and sweet, random bird Thursday. That was the ground scraper thrush. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And I'll see you in the next one. Cheers.