Streaky Seedeaters

A boldly marked seedeater of the highlands of East Africa, from Eritrea in the north south to the Albertine Rift and northern Tanzania, the well-named Streaky Seedeater is found in a wide variety of more or less wooded habitats, usually alone or in pairs, occasionally in small family parties. It forms a superspecies with the more southerly distributed Yellow-browed Seedeater (C. whytii) of southern Tanzania and adjoining Malawi and Zambia, and these two have, especially in the past, frequently been treated as conspecifics. While there remains discussion as to the most appropriate taxonomic arrangement—one species or two—what is undebatable is that Streaky Seedeater is much the better known of the two, principally due to fieldwork in the Kenyan portion of its range. Two subspecies are recognized, the nominate across most of the species’ distribution, and the much more range-restricted race graueri, in eastern DR Congo, southwestern Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda.