White-bellied Cuckooshrike

About the White-bellied Cuckooshrike

The white-bellied cuckooshrike (Coracina papuensis) is a species of bird in the family Campephagidae. It is found in Australia, the Moluccas, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. The white-bellied cuckooshrike 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 the crows in the genus Corvus and coined the binomial name Corvus papuensis. Gmelin based his description on "Le Choucari de la Nouvelle Guinée" that had been described in 1775 by the French polymath the Comte de Buffon and illustrated with a hand-coloured engraving by François-Nicolas Martinet. The type location was restricted to Manokwari in the Indonesian province of West Papua by Erwin Stresemann in 1913. The white-bellied cuckooshrike is now one of 22 species placed in the genus Coracina that was introduced in 1816 by French ornithologist Louis Pierre Vieillot.

Fourteen subspecies are recognised. C. p. papuensis (Gmelin, JF, 1788) – northern Moluccas, eastern Lesser Sunda Islands (Kisar, Luang, and Sermata), lowlands of northern and western New Guinea (Bird's Head Peninsula eastward, in the... Wikipedia →