Habitat
Forest or thick bush, with dense overhead and ground cover with soft earth, moss or leaf-litter, including the interiors or edges of more open types of forest, secondary growth and scrub or dense evergreen and deciduous thickets, banana and arrowroot plantations, neglected cultivation and rural gardens. From sea-level - 3,200 m.
Food
Invertebrates such as small ants, bugs, flies, small gastropods, cockroaches, Lepidoptera, centipedes, nematodes, Collembolla, earthworms, amphipods, isopods, millipedes, spiders, ticks, grasshoppers, crickets, termite workers and alates, adult and larval beetles, and slugs. Also grass and tree seeds.
Buff-spotted Flufftail (Sarothrura elegans) [XC305945]
by Vonny Strachan from Bushbuckridge (near Marongwana), Ehlanzeni, Mpumalanga, South Africa (call)
Buff-spotted Flufftail (Sarothrura elegans) [XC342697]
by James Bradley from Grahamstown, Western District, Eastern Cape, South Africa (call)
Nest
A domed structure or an open shallow cup with a roof of low vegetation, located on the ground in a small excavated depression, usually well-hidden in dense ground vegetation, tangled cover or under the leaves of a large plant in areas shaded by tall trees or within clumps of bushes.
Subspecies
Genus sometimes merged into Coturnicops. Possible subspecies buryi, loringi and languens known from single localities in Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania respectively, and not nowadays accepted.
The following 2 subspecies are recognised:
reichenovi (Sharpe, 1894) - Sierra Leone east to Zaire and Uganda, and south to northern Angola.
elegans (Smith, 1839) - Southern Ethiopia; extreme southern Sudan and western Kenya south through Zambia and Tanzania to eastern and southern South Africa.
BirdLife International Species Factsheet