Coraya Wren

About the Coraya Wren

The coraya wren (Pheugopedius coraya) is a species of bird in the family Troglodytidae, the wrens. The coraya wren was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with the thrushes in the genus Turdus and coined the binomial name Turdus coraya. Gmelin based his description on "Le Coraya" from Cayenne in French Guiana that had been described in 1778 by the French polymath the Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. A hand-coloured engraving by François-Nicolas Martinet was published to accompany Buffon's text. The word "coraya" as the specific epithet and in the common name is a homophone for the French queue rayée meaning "barred tail". The coraya wren is now one of twelve placed in the genus Pheugopedius that was introduced in 1851 by the German ornithologist Jean Cabanis.

Ten subspecies are recognised: P. c. obscurus (Zimmer, JT & Phelps, WH, 1947) – east Venezuela P. c. caurensis (Berlepsch & Hartert, EJO, 1902) – east Colombia, south Venezuela and northwest Brazil P. c. barrowcloughianus (Aveledo & Peréz, 1994) – southeast Venezuela... Wikipedia →