Western Plantain-eater
Crinifer piscator
Unusual gray turaco with a long tail and bushy crest. White bars in the outer wing are conspicuous in floppy flight. Found in savanna, woodland, shrubby cultivation, and gardens. Usually in small groups. Loud and vocal. The call is a series of yelps that accelerate and become louder, usually given in a wild duet or chorus. Very similar to Eastern Plantain-eater, but there is very little overlap in range; Western can be distinguished by the lack of white in the tail and the black-spotted rather than barred back.
Taxonomy
The western plantain-eater was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1770 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected in Senegal. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Falco piscator in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The western plantain-eater is now placed in the genus Crinifer that was erected by the Polish zoologist Feliks Paweł Jarocki in 1821. The generic name combines the Latin crinis meaning "hair" and -fer meaning "bearing". The specific name piscator is Latin for "fisherman.<p>The American ornithologist James L. Peters rejected the identification of Daubenton's plate with the western plantain-eater and instead used the specific epithet africanus that had been proposed by John Latham in 1790: "To recognize Daubenton's plate as representing Phasianus africanus Latham requires more imagination than I am capable of using." The plate may instead depict the African fish eagle.
- Scientific name
- Crinifer piscator
- Authority
- (Boddaert, 1783)
- Order
- Musophagiformes
- Family
- Musophagidae
- Genus
- Crinifer
Range and habitat
- Migration
- Resident species
Conservation
- Population trend
- stable
Photos
Distribution
Bird Calls
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