Emarginata tractrac
Silhouette: Martin Bulla, based on François Desbordes' illustration · PhyloPic
In 3 days ~10% in a week ~20%
The tractrac chat (Emarginata tractrac) is a small passerine bird of the Old World flycatcher family Muscicapidae. It is a common resident breeder in southernmost Angola, western Namibia and western South Africa. Its habitat is Karoo and desert scrub, hummock dunes and gravel plains.
The tractrac chat was illustrated and described by the French naturalist François Levaillant in Volume 4 of his Histoire naturelle des oiseaux d'Afrique published in 1805. He named the bird, "Le tractrac", an onomatopoeia based on its call. The first formal description of the tractrac chat was by the English publisher John Wilkes in 1817 under the binomial name Motacilla tractrac. The species was subsequently placed in the genus Cercomela introduced by Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1856. It was moved to its current genus, Emarginata, after molecular phylogenetic studies published in 2010 and 2012 found that Cercomela was polyphyletic.
There are 5 subspecies: E... Wikipedia →
Call0:12
South Africa · 2017
© Peter Boesman · XC392477 · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
| # | Park | Country | Daily sighting probability |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Namib-Naukluft National Park | 🇳🇦 Namibia | |
| 2 | Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park | 🇿🇦 South Africa |
Rare
Under 5% of wildlife watchers report a Tractrac Chat sighting in Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park on a given day, based on 10 verified sightings from GBIF citizen-science data from 2019 to 2026. It is the 106th most-seen of the 122 birds we can rate there. Over three days the chance rises to about 10%, and over a week to about 20%, if each day is a fresh chance.
February
In that month about 20% of wildlife watchers report a Tractrac Chat in Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park on a given day, against under 5% in March–April and June–January, the lowest months. That is one of Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park's wettest months, with about 35 mm of rain against almost none in July. May has too few records to rate.
Between 9 am and noon
Across all the parks we cover, that three-hour window holds the most Tractrac Chat sightings with a recorded time, and about 9 in 10 of them come between 6 am and 6 pm: it is a daytime animal.
2nd of 2
Of the 2 parks where we can rate Tractrac Chat sightings, Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park ranks 2nd at under 5%. The best odds are in Namib-Naukluft National Park (Namibia, about 10%).
GBIF citizen-science records
It is estimated from how often the Tractrac Chat is recorded against all the birds logged in Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (10 verified sightings from 2019 to 2026), calibrated against known sighting rates. Figures are rounded to the nearest 10% because citizen-science data supports honest approximations, not decimals, and months with records from fewer than five people show "—". How it works.
