The Namuli Apalis is a small Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

n passerine

Passerine

A passerine is a bird of the order Passeriformes, which includes more than half of all bird species. Sometimes known as perching birds or, less accurately, as songbirds, the passerines form one of the most diverse terrestrial vertebrate orders: with over 5,000 identified species, it has roughly...

 bird

Bird

Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...

 belonging to the genus Apalis

Apalis

The apalises are small passerine birds belonging to the genus Apalis. They are found in forest, woodlands and scrub across most parts of sub-Saharan Africa. They are slender birds with long tails and have a slender bill for catching insects. They are typically brown, grey or green above and several...

in the family Cisticolidae

Cisticolidae

The Cisticolidae family of small passerine birds is a group of about 110 warblers found mainly in warmer southern regions of the Old World. They are often included within the Old World warbler family Sylviidae....

. It was previously classified as a subspecies

Subspecies

Subspecies in biological classification, is either a taxonomic rank subordinate to species, ora taxonomic unit in that rank . A subspecies cannot be recognized in isolation: a species will either be recognized as having no subspecies at all or two or more, never just one...

 of the Bar-throated Apalis

Bar-throated Apalis

The Bar-throated Apalis is a small African passerine bird belonging to the genus Apalis of the family Cisticolidae.It inhabits forest and scrub in Southern and East Africa from southern and eastern parts of South Africa north as far as the Chyulu Hills in Kenya...

 (A. thoracica) but is increasingly treated as a species in its own right.

It is the only bird species endemic

Endemism in birds

An endemic bird area is a region of the world that contains two or more restricted-range species, while a "secondary area" contains one or more restricted-range species. Both terms were devised by Birdlife International....

 to Mozambique

Mozambique

Mozambique, officially the Republic of Mozambique , is a country in southeastern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west and Swaziland and South Africa to the southwest...

 and is found only in the Mount Namuli

Mount Namuli

Mount Namuli is the highest peak in the Zambezia Province of Mozambique. With 2,419 metre it is the second highest mountain of Mozambique behind the Monte Binga. The Namuli massif consists of a level plateau which rises 700 to 800 metre. The granite dome of the Namuli rises 1,600 metre above the...

 massif in the north of the country where it was first discovered in 1932 by the English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

-born ornithologist Jack Vincent

Jack Vincent

Jack Vincent MBE was an English ornithologist.-Biography:Vincent was born in London. At age 21 he moved to South Africa where he worked on two farms in the Richmond district of the Natal Province. In the 1920s he went back to England where he became a bird collector for the British Museum in London...

. There were no more records until an expedition rediscovered it in 1998. The bird is now known to be common in forest, forest edge and woodland patches above 1200 m. Logging

Logging

Logging is the cutting, skidding, on-site processing, and loading of trees or logs onto trucks.In forestry, the term logging is sometimes used in a narrow sense concerning the logistics of moving wood from the stump to somewhere outside the forest, usually a sawmill or a lumber yard...

of the forest is a potential threat but it appears to survive well in degraded and fragmented habitat.

It has a grey crown and nape and black throat and breast. The rest of the underparts are yellow and the upperparts are green. The outer tail-feathers are white. The bird is 11 to 12 cm long. The male and female have different calls and duet with the female responding to the male's call.

It feeds mainly on insects and other small invertebrates but also eats some seeds and berries. It forages in pairs or small groups, often feeding on the ground or making short flights into the air.

The nest is a dome of moss built at least one metre above the ground.