Birds and biogeography of Mount Mecula in Mozambique’s Niassa National Reserve

Ostrich is co-published by NISC (Pty) Ltd and Taylor & Francis Northern Mozambique has a series of isolated montane inselbergs whose avifauna has only fully come to light in the last two decades, owing in part to the civil war which made the area largely inaccessible from the 1970s until the early 1990s. These inselbergs are especially significant because, first, they contribute to a biogeographical link between the highly biodiverse Eastern Arc mountains of Tanzania, and the highlands of Malawi, eastern Zimbabwe and South Africa (Bayliss et al. 2014). Second, they are of increasingly significant conservation importance as the montane and mid-altitude forests of adjacent southern Malawi, in particular, are degraded or destroyed (Spottiswoode et al. 2008). Recent discoveries of relatively large Mozambican populations of species highly threatened elsewhere, such as the Endangered Thyolo Alethe Alethe choloensis, have underscored the conservation importance of this vast region (Spottiswoode et al. 2008; Dowsett-Lemaire 2010). In recent years northern Mozambique’s montane forests also have faced rapidly increasing threat from deforestation, particularly at Mt Namuli (Dowsett-Lemaire 2010), in addition to widespread commercial logging in miombo woodlands at lower altitudes (Hervey 2012). Short Note