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9 March 2021 First record of Forbes-Watson's Swift Apus berliozi in southern Africa, with comments on vocal and visual identification
Etienne Marais, Faansie Peacock, Gary Allport
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Abstract

We report the first record of Forbes-Watson's Swift Apus berliozi for the southern Africa region from coastal southern Mozambique. Identification was primarily based on vocal characters using sonogram analyses, which show that voice is diagnostic compared to all seven possible confusion species in the region. Current knowledge of the distribution and life history of A. berliozi is summarised, which shows that the Mozambique record extends the non-breeding range c.1,700 km south and suggests that Forbes-Watson's Swift is a migrant to the littoral of Tanzania and northern and central Mozambique. Field identification of Forbes-Watson's Swift using visual characters is challenging, but information is presented to aid separation from the most likely confusion species, Common Swift A. apus.

© 2021 The Authors; This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Etienne Marais, Faansie Peacock, and Gary Allport "First record of Forbes-Watson's Swift Apus berliozi in southern Africa, with comments on vocal and visual identification," Bulletin of the British Ornithologists’ Club 141(1), 21-38, (9 March 2021). https://doi.org/10.25226/bboc.v141i1.2021.a3
Received: 29 May 2020; Published: 9 March 2021
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