Broad-tailed Grassbird

The broad-tailed grassbird is a small, mostly brown Old World warbler of the family Locustellidae, with uniform brown upperparts and a broad, round-tipped, long graduated tail with thin dark bars, the underside very dark with white-tipped feathers. It has a buff eyebrow, and males and females are indistinguishable. It is endemic to the Western Ghats, restricted to grassy moist highlands, principally south of Karnataka but with some records from Pune, Lonavala and Nashik (Wikipedia, general species account).

It is found only on the higher-altitude grassy hills, where it usually skulks except in the breeding season, when males fly up to sing in display, with a repeated lark-like trill accompanied by a fanned tail and fluttering flight; other calls include a chack and a zink. The usual clutch is two or three eggs. SoIB 2023 treats it as a Western Ghats endemic and rates it a High conservation priority, a resident and local migrant with a Restricted range of about 11,200 km² and insufficient data on trends (Wikipedia, general species account; SoIB 2023).