Karoo chat Karoo chat The Karoo chat ("Emarginata schlegelii") is a small passerine bird of the Old World flycatcher family Muscicapidae. It is a common resident breeder in southwesternmost Angola, western Namibia and western South Africa. Its habitat is Karoo and desert scrub in the south, extending to the escarpment zone in the north. The first formal description of the Karoo chat was by the Swedish naturalist Johan August Wahlberg in 1855 under the binomial name "Erithacus schlegelii". The species was subsequently placed in the genus "Cercomela" introduced by Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1856. It was moved to its current genus, "Emarginata",
Karoo desert ephemerals, spaced 50 cm or more apart, and becoming very sparse going northwards into Bushmanland and, from there, into the Kalahari Desert. The driest region of the Karoo, however, is its southwestern corner, between the Great Escarpment and the Cederberg-Skurweberg mountain ranges, called the Tankwa Karoo, which receives only 75 mm of rain annually. The eastern and north-eastern Karoo are often covered by large patches of grassland. The typical Karoo vegetation used to support large game, sometimes in vast herds. Today, sheep thrive on the xerophytes, though each sheep requires about 4 ha of grazing to sustain itself. The