Indian Scimitar Babbler

The Indian scimitar babbler is an Old World babbler found in peninsular India in a range of forest habitats. It has been treated in the past as a subspecies of the white-browed scimitar babbler of the Himalaya, and is now separated from it and from the Sri Lanka scimitar babbler. The most distinctive feature of this 22 cm bird is the long, down-curved yellow bill, blackish at the base of the upper mandible, used to work through leaf litter and bark. It has a long white eyebrow above a broad black band through the eye, a white throat and breast, dark greyish-brown upperparts and a long, broad, graduated tail (Wikipedia, general species account).

It is hard to see in the dense vegetation it prefers, but noisy: the bubbling call, a loud fluty oop-pu-pu-pu followed immediately by a krukru, often as an antiphonal duet, is the best indication of its presence. It is a non-migratory resident breeder and breeds from December to May. SoIB 2023 treats it as endemic to mainland India and rates it a Low conservation priority, a resident forest bird with a Large range of about 271,000 km², a decline of about 48% over the long term and an increasing current trend (Wikipedia, general species account; SoIB 2023).