Broad-tailed Grassbird turns up at the edge of its range near Pune

Two Broad-tailed Grassbirds (*Schoenicola platyurus*) were seen on the grassy hill at Kanifnath Temple, south-east of Pune, on 8 September, with four separate reports that day.¹ The bird's stronghold is the wet hill grassland of the Western Ghats, mostly south of Karnataka.² Pune, Lonavala and Nashik sit at the thin northern edge of where it has been recorded.²

It is a warbler-shaped bird, but a heavy one for its kind, and the tail does most of the identifying. The upperparts are plain rufous-brown with no streaking. The throat is white, the belly buff, and a buff eyebrow runs back from a thick bill. The tail is long, broad and rounded at the tip, with the feathers graduated in length and faint dark bars across the brown. Underneath, the tail is so dark it reads black, and each feather is tipped white. Males and females look alike. A singing bird with a black inside to its bill is a male; a brown gape marks a female.

Telling it from the other small brown birds in the same grass comes down to bulk and tail. The Plain Prinia and Jungle Prinia are smaller, slimmer birds that cock a narrow tail upward, wren-fashion. The Zitting Cisticola is a third the size, streaked black on the back, with a rufous rump and a tiny white-tipped fan of a tail that it flicks constantly. The Booted Warbler, a winter visitor arriving about now, is a small plain greyish bird with a short square tail and a chiffchaff's build. None of those carries a tail that long, that broad, and that dark beneath.

It eats insects and takes most of them low in the grass. For most of the year it is a skulker: it works inside grass clumps, shows briefly at the top of one, and drops back in. The exception is the breeding season, which runs with the south-west monsoon. Then the male climbs a tall stem that stands clear of the grass, gives a sweet, shrill trill in a steady stream ending in a few warbling and chak notes, and launches into a fluttering flight with the broad tail fanned open. That display is what makes the bird findable in June and July. Nests have been recorded from March to May and again in July and September, and the species is suspected of raising two broods.³ By mid-September the display season is closing and birds go back into the grass. A grassbird seen now is most likely finishing a late brood or already in its quiet mode, so a clear look at the tail counts for more than waiting for a song.

Its needs are narrow: tall, moist grassland on hills, left standing through the monsoon. BirdLife International assesses it as Vulnerable, with a small, fragmented population put at between 2,500 and 9,999 mature birds, and names clearance and modification of grasslands as the cause of its decline.⁴ What the Kanifnath hill offers it is grass at the right height in the right season. What happens to that grass after the rains, whether it is cut, grazed or burned, decides whether the hill is still usable to the bird next monsoon.