Flufftail

alt=Two red-chested flufftails. A female on the left and a male on the right. |thumb|A display of sexual dimorphism in two red-chested flufftails. A young female is shown on the left, and an adult male is shown on the right. Flufftails (genus Sarothrura) are small birds related to rails and finfoots. There are nine species, seven of which are distributed across sub-Saharan Africa, with the remaining two in Madagascar. The genus was long placed with the rail family Rallidae, but is now placed in the family Sarothruridae, along with three other species of wood rails (genus Canirallus).

==Taxonomy== The genus Sarothrura was introduced in 1890 by the German ornithologist Ferdinand Heine as a replacement name for Corethrura that Ludwig Reichenbach had introduced in 1853. The name Corethrura was preoccupied as it had been used for a different genus in 1846 by the English zoologist George Gray. The type species was specified by Reichenbach as Gallinula jardinei A. Smith 1839, which a junior synonym of Crex affinis A. Smith, 1828, the striped flufftail. The genus name Sarothrura combines the Ancient Greek σαρωτρον/sarōtron meaning "broom" with ουρα/oura meaning "tail".