Brown Cuckoo-Dove (1 Viewer)

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Can anyone please clarify, should this bird in Australia be submitted as M. amboinensis or M. phasianella? Can the two be linked in Opus so if someone is searching for one, they both come up? Many thanks.

For your further information there seems to be some ambiguity...

Wikipedia states the Brown Cuckoo-Dove (or Slender-billed Cuckoo Dove) has been split into two species: M. amboinensis (Slender-billed Cuckoo-Dove) of eastern Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, and M. phasianella (Brown Cuckoo-Dove) of eastern Australia.

In contradiction to this, Pizzey & Knight (8th ed) as well as the website "Birds in Backyards" catalogue the Australian "Brown Cuckoo-Dove" as M. amboinensis.

I'm not sure who is the reigning authority, but it sure explains why there aren't too many posts for M. phasianella, because some will be posted as M. amboinensis.

For further consideration from http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/160032123/0 claims "Macropygia amboinensis and M. phasianella (Sibley and Monroe 1990, 1993) have been lumped into M. amboinensis following Christidis and Boles (1994)."

In the Opus we follow a consensus of the three major world check list, Clements, Howard & Moore and the IOC list. Clements and the IOC retain the split and so in Australia it's Brown Cuckoo-Dove, Macropygia phasianella. I have updated the range in the Opus and all pictures in the gallery can now be found under this scientific name.
Thanks for pointing that one out.

André

There's a useful summary of the various treatments in Christidis & Boles 2008 – see p71–72.