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Ian uses the bird of the week email to keep list members up to date with developments, such as improvements to the website. Your email address will not be revealed to anyone else nor used for any other purpose.
Ian reports:
It's back to Australia this week with the Buff-sided Robin, which we encountered in far northwestern Queensland on the Grasswrens survey in July.
This is a new species - Poecilodryas cerviniventris
- in the sense that it has been recently elevated to species status,
having previously been treated as a race of the White-browed Robin Poecilodryas superciliosa.
This change was made on the basis of plumage differences and the larger
size of the Buff-sided, and I was struck how different it looked. The
Buff-sided Robin has a northern distribution from the Kimberleys in
northwestern Western Australia through the top end of the Northern
Territory and just across the border into northwestern Queensland. The
White-browed Robin occurs only in northern and eastern Queensland.
Both
species are delightful birds and the appropriate words "handsome" and
"sprightly" are used in the field guide (Pizzey and Knight). They hop
around in riverine forest, drooping their wings as in the main photo,
and cocking their tails as in the second. They have distinctive
staccato calls and piping notes, usually the first sign of their
presence as they can be hard to spot in the foliage.
The
common names of birds are often based on appearance rather than
taxonomy, and this is the case here. These two belong to the family
Petroicidae or Australo-Papuan Robins and are not related to the Eurasian and American Robins (Turdidae and/or Muscicapidae). I've just finished revising the galleries of the Australo-Papuan Robins on the website and you might like to check them out.
Best wishes,
Ian
Ian reports:
This Bird of the Week pays tribute to Wingspan, the quarterly magazine of Birds Australia, which has honoured me by publishing a 5 page article with a dozen colour photos, on the birds of the Cloud Forests of Ecuador. I took the photos on a visit to Bellavista Reserve in the mountains about 90km from Quito in October 2005. Wingspan is a splendid magazine and has just received the sixth Whitley award from the Royal Zoological Society of NSW for Outstanding Periodical Publication: congratulations to content and production editors Penny Olsen and Sophie Knezic, respectively.
This week's bird is a female Masked Trogon. Her gorgeous emerald green and crimson mate appeared as Bird of the Week 3 years ago - and in the article - but female Trogons are quite beautiful too, if less showy/more tasteful. At Bellavista, they left some outside lights on at night so guests wouldn't fall down the mountainside, and various birds, including this pair of Trogons, would appear every morning to clean up the moths and other forest bugs lured in during the night.
Owing to an oversight on my part, the article didn't include a photo of the amazing Andean Cock of the Rock. This was also a Bird of the Week in 2005 and I've attached it here as compensation. Another Bird of the Week encountered there, and mentioned in the article, is the rare Moustached Antpitta and I've reproduced it here as well.
Best wishes,
Ian
