Bush Warblers and Allies

Seventeen species, and most of this family are a sound long before they are a sighting. Bush warblers and tesias live low, in dense undergrowth and tangled forest floor, and are built for skulking rather than showing off — plain olive-brown birds, round-bodied and often nearly tailless, that announce themselves with a loud, distinctive song from cover and then refuse to come out. Getting a clean frame of one is mostly a matter of patience at the edge of a clearing where the undergrowth thins for a moment.

A handful of genera break that pattern entirely. Rufous-faced Warbler and Black-faced Warbler are canopy and mid-storey birds, small, active and brightly patterned in yellow, grey and black, closer in habit to a warbler proper than to their skulking relatives. Mountain Tailorbird sits somewhere in between — a forest-floor bird, but a vocal and sometimes confiding one. The family's diversity in India is almost entirely a Himalayan and Northeast hill-forest story.