Journal of East African Natural History 101(2): 223–240 (2012) AVIFAUNA OF VWAZA MARSH WILDLIFE RESERVE, MALAWI Joshua I. Engel, John M. Bates, Jason D. Weckstein, Thomas P. Gnoske Zoology Department, Field Museum of Natural History 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60605, USA jengel2@fieldmuseum.org, jbates@fieldmuseum.org, jweckstein@fieldmuseum.org, tgnoske@fieldmuseum.org Potiphar M. Kaliba 1 Museums of Malawi P.O. Box 30360, Chichiri, Blantyre 3, Malawi pmkaliba@yahoo.com ABSTRACT Despite having a well-documented avifauna, some areas of Malawi, such as Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve (986 km²), are still poorly known ornithologically. We spent 12 days in October 2009, before the wet season, and two days in November 2009, after the first rains, documenting the birds of Vwaza. We found six new species for the Reserve—red-chested flufftail, African pitta, African broadbill, African reed warbler, marsh tchagra, and dark-capped yellow warbler—and we recorded 56 new quadrat records, filling in distributional gaps in the Malawi bird atlas. Many of these records are documented with voucher specimens. Here we provide a complete list of the 394 species of birds known to occur in Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve. Keywords: Vwaza Marsh, Malawi, birds, protected areas, wetlands, miombo, Important Bird Area INTRODUCTION Malawi is part of a region that represents a transition between east, central, and southern Africa. Although some of this region’s bird distribution is documented through atlas projects (e.g. Kenya, Zambia, Uganda, forthcoming for Tanzania), given the scarcity of ornithologists and birders, it is no surprise that many gaps in our knowledge of bird distribution endure. Malawi is a small country with an atlas-level distribution of birds presented in The Birds of Malawi (Dowsett-Lemaire 2006; Dowsett-Lemaire & Dowsett, 2006); despite this, some parts of the country—including protected areas—have not been surveyed in detail. One of these areas is the northern sector of Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve, which lies on the Zambian border in the north-western part of the country, ca. 140 1 Current address: Department of Antiquities, P.O. Box 264, Lilongwe, Malawi