Scientific name: Sigelus silens
The fiscal flycatcher is 17–20 cm in length. The adult male is black above and white below with white wing patches and white sides to the tail. The female is brown, not black, above. The juvenile is like the female but duller and with brown spots and scalloping above and below. The male can be confused with the comman fiscal shrike, but the shrike has a heavy hooked bill, a white patch on the shoulder and a white wing pathe.
Endemic to southern Africa, occurring from south-eastern Botswana and the extreme south of Mozambique to Swaziland and South Africa. It generally favours open habitats with scattered trees or bushes to use as perches, such as moist and semi-arid grassland, fynbos, Nama Karoo, valley bushveld, scrub Acacia and kloof bush in highveld. It is most common in ecotones between two habitats; one with fairly dense thicket used for nesting and another with large patches of open ground for foraging.
It mainly eats small insects supplemented with fruit, doing most of its foraging from a high perch, pouncing on prey on the ground and occasionally hawking prey aerially. It may occasionally be seen in large mixed-species foraging flocks, especially at termite alate emergences and where there are half asleep (torpid) ants on the ground.
