Yellow Canary
Crithagra flaviventris
A large canary with different-looking males and females. The male has bright yellow underparts, yellow-green upperparts, and a well-marked face pattern. The female is drab gray-brown with streaky underparts, yellowish edges of the wing feathers, and a yellow rump. Pairs and small groups occupy dry rangelands including coastal scrub, Karoo, and arid thornveld, where they are resident and nomadic, moving when food becomes scarce. The larger Brimstone Canary has a chunkier bill than Yellow Canary and prefers moist coastal thickets and woodland.
Identification
The yellow canary is typically 10 cm in length. The adult male colour ranges from almost uniform yellow in the northwest of its range to streaked, olive backed birds in the southeast. The underparts, rump and tail sides are yellow. The female has grey-brown upperparts, black wings with yellow flight feathers, and a pale supercilium. The underparts are white with brown streaking. The juvenile resembles the female, but has heavier streaking.<p>This species is easily distinguished from the yellow-fronted canary by its lack of black facial markings, and its bill is less heavy than that of other similar African Crithagra species.<p>The brimstone canary, with overlapping range, is a known confusion species.
Taxonomy
The yellow canary 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 crossbills in the genus Loxia and coined the binomial name Loxia flaviventris. He specified the location as the Cape of Good Hope. The specific epithet flaviventris is from Latin flavus meaning "yellow" and venter, ventris meaning "belly". Gmelin based his account on the "Le Gros-bec jaune du Cap de Bonne Espérance" that had been described and illustrated in 1760 by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson.<p>The yellow canary was formerly placed in the genus Serinus but a phylogenetic study published in 2012 found that the genus was polyphyletic. In the reorganisation to create monophyletic genera, Serinus was split and a number of species including the yellow canary were moved to the resurrected genus Crithagra that had originally been introduced in 1827 by the English ornithologist William Swainson.<p>Four subspecies are recognised:
- Scientific name
- Crithagra flaviventris
- Authority
- (Gmelin, JF, 1789)
- Order
- Passeriformes
- Family
- Fringillidae
- Genus
- Crithagra
Range and habitat
Its habitat is karoo and coastal or mountain valley scrub. It builds a compact cup nest in a scrub.<p>The yellow canary is a common and gregarious seedeater. Its call is chissick or cheree, and the song is a warbled zee-zeree-chereeo.
- Migration
- Resident species
Conservation
- Population trend
- stable
Photos
Distribution
Bird Calls
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