The male Pin-Tailed Whydah (below) is one of the birds I most wanted to see. The Sooty Chat is gravy.

Our timing was good: a week earlier we'd seen Pin-Tailed Whydahs that were molting into breeding plumage but didn't have long tails yet.

Vidua macroura and Myrmecocichla nigra, both adult males, Masai Mara, June 28

Linguistic notes (I've restrained myself elsewhere): the American Heritage and Oxford dictionaries give the pronunciation of "whydah" as "widda", but the Kenyan pronunciation seems to be "wide-a".

American Heritage says the word is an alteration of "widow" as in "widowbird", that being the other group of African birds with long black tails (like the plumes widows used to wear on their hats for dressy occasions). Oxford says it's from the city of Ouidah (also known as Whydah) in Benin but mentions "widow". Maybe we're supposed to think that uneducated people pronounced "widow" as "widda" and overeducated people thought they were referring to the city.