Philippine Magpie-Robin
Copsychus mindanensis
A common medium-sized bird of open forest, scrub, and gardens from the lowlands to middle elevations in the mountains. Male has black upperparts, throat, and chest, a white belly, and a prominent white mark in the wing. In the female, the black parts are replaced by gray, except for the wing, which remains black. Similar in size and color to Philippine Pied-Fantail, but has a white mark in the wing. Song is a pleasant, medium-pitched warbling. Also gives a short descending scratchy song, harsh rasping notes, or a pulsing, downslurred “chew! chew! chew!”
Taxonomy
The Philippine magpie-robin was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1775 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. 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 Turdus mindanensis in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The Philippine magpie-robin is now one of 12 species placed in the genus Copsychus that was introduced by the German naturalist Johann Georg Wagler in 1827. It was formerly considered as a subspecies of the oriental magpie-robin (Copsychus saularis) but was promoted to species status based on the results of a molecular phylogenetic study that was published in 2009. The species is monotypic. The genus name Copsychus is from the Ancient Greek kopsukhos or kopsikhos for a "blackbird". The specific mindanensis comes from "Mindanao", the type locality.
- Scientific name
- Copsychus mindanensis
- Authority
- (Boddaert, 1783)
- Order
- Passeriformes
- Family
- Muscicapidae
- Genus
- Copsychus
Range and habitat
- Migration
- Resident species
Conservation
- Population trend
- stable
Photos
Distribution
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