Indochinese Roller

About the Indochinese Roller

The Indochinese roller (Coracias affinis) or Burmese roller, is a member of the roller bird family. It occurs widely from Nepal, eastern India to Myanmar and Southeast Asia. It is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List.

The Indochinese roller was formally described in 1840 by the American naturalist Thomas Horsfield under the binomial name Coracias affinis based on specimens that had been collected in Assam by the naturalist John McClelland. The specific epithet affinis is from Latin adfinis or affinis meaning "related" or "allied".

McClelland has sometimes been credited as the authority but under the rules of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature Horsfield now receives the credit. The Indochinese roller was formerly considered as a subspecies of the Indian roller because of a narrow hybrid zone in northeast India but a molecular phylogenetic study published in 2018 found that the Indochinese roller was more closely related to the purple-winged roller (Coracias temminckii) than it is to the Indian roller. The Indochinese roller is monotypic: no subspecies are recognised.

The phylogenetic relationships among the Coracias species are shown below, from... Wikipedia →