Painted Francolin

The painted francolin resembles a female black francolin but lacks the rufous hind collar, showing instead a bright rufous face and throat with no dark stripe behind the eye. The underparts are boldly spotted white, the legs orange-yellow to red, and neither sex has spurs. Where its range meets the black francolin's in the north, the two are said to interbreed. It is more arboreal than the black francolin and roosts in trees, sometimes on the ground (Wikipedia, general species account).

It is hard to see until the breeding season after the monsoon, roughly June to October, when birds give a guttural, broken crowing phrase in the early morning from a mound, bush or stump, answered by their neighbours. It eats grass seeds, rice grain, beetles and other insects, and the tubers of nut grass. When disturbed it tends to freeze and flush only at close range. The nest is a ground scrape with six or seven eggs. SoIB 2023 treats it as endemic to the Indian subcontinent and resident in India, with uncertain trends and a Low conservation priority (Wikipedia, general species account; SoIB 2023).