Tracing Africa’s ‘fading biological fingerprints’ in Angola’s threatened forests

WIN BIG with Horizon Shopping Centre’s Deal of the Month Competition…Revolutionizing the Digital Landscape: Our CEO’s Vision for Unlimited Web Hosting…Angola’s Afromontane forests are considered to be the country’s most threatened habitat type due to logging, wood harvesting and fire.

MOUNT MOCO, Angola — “Another one incoming,” shouts ornithologist Michael Mills to his colleague crouching a few meters away on the flanks of Mount Moco, Angola’s highest mountain. “Oh heck, it’s gone over the top.” Gabriel Jamie and Michael Mills set up a mist net on Mount Moco to catch Huambo cisticolas. Image by Ryan Truscott for MongabayThe site of all this activity is a patch of restored Afromontane forest growing above the village of Kanjonde, at the foot of Mount Moco, in Angola’s western Huambo Highlands.

“We know the cuckoo-finches mimic the eggs of their hosts, and in response to being mimicked, the cisticolas evolve this amazing egg diversity within each species,” says Jamie, who’s also affiliated with the University of Cape Town’s Fitzpatrick Institute of African Ornithology. “In the absence of the forest, presumably the ecotone would go as well, and the habitat wouldn’t be there,” Jamie says. And that won’t just be bad news for Huambo cisticolas.

“After surviving 2.6 million years of climatic oscillations through the Pleistocene, the relict Afromontane forests of Angola are shrinking ‘sky islands’ in an ocean of fire,” writes South Africa-based conservation scientist Brian Huntley in his 2023 book, Ecology of Angola. “We also saw, when you reconstruct the past climates, that on many occasions Angola the most stable conditions for the forests, and this might explain why for some species of birds we have very old lineages that, with further study, we might split into separate species because they’ve been there for a long time.”

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