Spot-backed Antbird

About the Spot-backed Antbird

The spot-backed antbird (Hylophylax naevius) is a species of bird in subfamily Thamnophilinae of family Thamnophilidae, the "typical antbirds". It is found in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.

The spot-backed antbird 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 manakins in the genus Pipra and coined the binomial name Pipra naevia. Gmelin based his description on the Fourmillier tacheté, de Cayenne that had been depicted in a hand-colored engraving by François-Nicolas Martinet that was published to accompany Comte de Buffon's Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. The specific epithet is from Latin naevius meaning "spotted". The spot-backed antbird is now placed with two other species in the genus Hylophylax that was introduced in 1909 by the American ornithologist Robert Ridgway.

The International Ornithological Congress and the Clements taxonomy recognize these five subspecies of the spot-backed antbird: H. n. theresae (des Murs, 1856) H. n. peruvianus Carriker, 1932 H. n. inexpectatus... Wikipedia →