Esmeraldas Antbird

About the Esmeraldas Antbird

The Esmeraldas antbird (Sipia nigricauda) is a species of bird in subfamily Thamnophilinae of family Thamnophilidae, the "typical antbirds". It is found in Colombia and Ecuador. The Esmeraldas antbird has a complicated taxonomic history. It was described by the naturalists Osbert Salvin and Frederick DuCane Godman in 1892 and given the binomial name Myrmeciza nigricauda. It was later reassigned as a subspecies of Myrmeciza laemosticta. At about the same time, M. laemosticta was moved into a new genus, Sipia. The original description was of a female bird and this was later the source of taxonomic confusion. The male bird was considered a different species (Sipia rosenbergi) until in 1991 it was realized that the two taxa were simply the male and female forms of the same species. The authors of the 1991 paper promoted nigricauda to species rank and by the principle of priority the specific epithet rosenbergi disappeared. In addition, the authors merged Sipia back into Myrmeciza. A molecular phylogenetic study published in 2013 found that the genus Myrmeciza, as then defined, was polyphyletic. In the resulting rearrangement to create monophyletic genera,... Wikipedia →