Chestnut-bellied Cuckoo

About the Chestnut-bellied Cuckoo

The chestnut-bellied cuckoo (Coccyzus pluvialis) is a species of bird in the tribe Phaenicophaeini, subfamily Cuculinae of the cuckoo family Cuculidae. It is endemic to Jamaica. The chestnut-bellied cuckoo was formally described in 1788 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with all the other cuckoos in the genus Cuculus and coined the binomial name Cuculus pluvialis. Gmelin based his account on those of earlier authors include that of the Irish physician, naturalist and collector Hans Sloane. Between 1687 and 1689 Sloane lived in Jamaica. In the account of his stay, which was not published until 1725, he described the chestnut-bellied cuckoo under the names "Old-Man" and "Raine-bird" and explained that "It makes a noise generally before rain, whence it had its name of Rain Bird". The chestnut-bellied cuckoo is now placed with 12 other species in the genus Coccyzus that was introduced in 1816 by the French ornithologist Louis Pierre Vieillot. The genus name is from the Ancient Greek kokkuzō meaning "to cry cuckoo". The specific epithet pluvialis is Latin meaning... Wikipedia →