Charlatán de Los Nilgiri

Identificación

This laughingthrush is about 24 cm long with a rufous underside and a dark olive grey upper body. The crown is slaty brown and there is a jagged and broad white supercilium margined with black. The throat, lores and a streak behind the eye are black. The tail is olive brown. The iris is reddish brown and the legs and bill are black. The upper breast is grey in the subspecies jerdoni and can appear somewhat like fairbanki although the throat of the latter is grey and the two do not overlap in range. It is unmistakable in plumage although at a quick glance it can be mistaken for an Indian scimitar babbler.

Taxonomía

The species was described by the English zoologist Thomas Jerdon in 1839 under the binomial name Crateroptus cachinnans. In 1872 he noted that the form Trochalopteron jerdoni that he had discovered on the peak of Banasura [=Banasore] in Wayanad would likely also occur in Coorg. He added that they were separated by lower hills despite being only about 50 to 60 miles from the western edge of the Nilgiris. The species jerdoni included fairbanki and meridionale (both from south of the Palghat Gap) while cachinnans was kept separate. This treatment of jerdoni and cachinnans as species continued until 2005 when Rasmussen and Anderton grouped the black-chinned forms north of the Palghat Gap into one species with jerdoni of Coorg-Wynaad treated as a subspecies of cachinnans. The wider distribution of the taxon made the older name of "Nilgiri laughing-thrush" inappropriate. The form south of the Palghat gap without a black chin was elevated to a full species, fairbanki with meridionale as a subspecies, and called the Kerala laughingthrush. Stuart Baker in the second edition of the Fauna of British India included a subspecies cinnamomeum described by William Ruxton Davison from two specimens obtained by Atholl Macgregor, British Resident in Travancore, from an unknown location. This is usually not recognized but the description was based on two specimens with the black of the chin and lores replaced by dark brown. Stuart Baker used several genera for the south Indian laughingthrushes. Trochalopteron was said to have the nostril visible and not covered by overhanging bristles as in Ianthocincla, the genus in which the Wayanad laughingthrush was placed. Subsequent revision by Ripley and Ali lumped all the south Indian laughingthrushes into the single genus Garrulax. The genus splits were, however, reinstated on the basis of differences in structure and the species was included in a previously erected genus Trochalopteron. A detailed phylogenetic study published in 2017 identified that the south Indian species that were included in Trochalopteron were best treated as a sister group of a clade that included Leiothrix, Minla, Heterophasia and Actinodura and they were not closely related to members of Trochalopteron in the strict sense. This led to a need to establish a new genus Montecincla (with the type species being the first described species, Montecincla cachinnans).

Nombre científico

Montecincla cachinnans

Autoridad

(Jerdon, 1839)

Orden

Passeriformes

Familia

Leiothrichidae

Género

Montecincla

Distribución y hábitat

Migración

Especie residente

Comportamiento

Patrón migratorio: Especie residente.

Conservación

Tendencia poblacional: en declive.

Tendencia poblacional

en declive