This species has been widely recorded over much of Subsaharan Africa. The distribution is patchy and discontinuous and they only occur where there is suitable habitat. The species is distributed from Senegal, The Gambia and Guinea in West Africa eastwards to the Central African Republic, northern Democratic Republic of the Congo and southern Sudan, and from here into East Africa where it ranges from Uganda and Kenya southwards throughout much of Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe and southern Mozambique into eastern South Africa (the Grahamstown district in the Eastern Cape province is the southerly limit [Skinner and Smithers 1990]). It has been recorded from 1,800 m asl on Kilimanjaro (Grimshaw et al. 1995)