Black nunbird
The black nunbird (Monasa atra) is a species of bird in the family Bucconidae, the puffbirds. It is found in north-central South America in the Guianas of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana including the Guiana Shield; also eastern and southeastern Venezuela in the eastern Orinoco River Basin, and the Amazon Basin of northeast Brazil in the north-central and northeast. It is not found south of the Amazon River, and its western limit bordering southeast Venezuela is the Rio Negro.
Black nunbird | |
---|---|
Black nunbird at Manaus, Amazonas state, Brazil | |
Scientific classification | |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Class: | Aves |
Order: | Piciformes |
Genus: | Monasa |
Species: | M. atra |
Binomial name | |
Monasa atra (Boddaert, 1783) | |
Its natural habitat is subtropical and tropical moist lowland forests.
Taxonomy
The black nunbird was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected in Cayenne, French Guiana.[2] 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.[3] Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Calculus ater in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.[4] The black nunbird is now placed in the genus Monasa that was introduced by the French ornithologist Louis Vieillot in 1816.[5][6] The species in monotypic.[6]. The generic name is from the Ancient Greek monas meaning "solitary". The specific epithet atra is from the Latin ater meaning "black".[7]
References
- BirdLife International (2012). "Monasa atra". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2012. Retrieved 26 November 2013.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
- Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc de (1780). "Le coucou noir de Cayenne". Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (in French). Volume 12. Paris: De L'Imprimerie Royale. p. 84–85.
- Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc de; Martinet, François-Nicolas; Daubenton, Edme-Louis; Daubenton, Louis-Jean-Marie (1765–1783). "Coucou noir de Cayenne". Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle. Volume 6. Paris: De L'Imprimerie Royale. Plate 512.
- Boddaert, Pieter (1783). Table des planches enluminéez d'histoire naturelle de M. D'Aubenton : avec les denominations de M.M. de Buffon, Brisson, Edwards, Linnaeus et Latham, precedé d'une notice des principaux ouvrages zoologiques enluminés (in French). Utrecht. p. 30, Number 512.
- Vieillot, Louis Jean Pierre (1816). Analyse d'une Nouvelle Ornithologie Elementaire (in French). Paris: Deterville/self. p. 27.
- Gill, Frank; Donsker, David, eds. (2019). "Jacamars, puffbirds, toucans, barbets, honeyguides". World Bird List Version 9.2. International Ornithologists' Union. Retrieved 24 July 2019.
- Jobling, James A. (2010). The Helm Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names. London: Christopher Helm. pp. 58, 259. ISBN 978-1-4081-2501-4.
External links
- Black nunbird videos in the Internet Bird Collection
- Black nunbird photo gallery VIREO Photo-High Res