Marquesan kingfisher

The Marquesan kingfisher or Marquesas kingfisher (Todiramphus godeffroyi) is a species of bird in the family Alcedinidae. It is endemic to French Polynesia. It is threatened by habitat loss and predation by introduced species, and is currently classified as Critically endangered, with fewer than 500 individuals left in the wild.

Marquesan kingfisher

Critically Endangered  (IUCN 3.1)[1]
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Coraciiformes
Family: Alcedinidae
Subfamily: Halcyoninae
Genus: Todiramphus
Species:
T. godeffroyi
Binomial name
Todiramphus godeffroyi
(Finsch, 1877)
Synonyms
  • Todirhamphus godeffroyi (Finsch, 1877) [orth. error]
  • Halcyon godeffroyi (Collar and Andrew, 1988)

Description

This unique bird is approximately 22 cm tall with a buff triangle on its upper back. It has completely white plumage on its crown, mantle, forehead, and center upper back along with featuring a blue eye-stripe pattern ending as broken line behind head. It also has a unique bright blue-green lower back, rump, tail and wings.

Distribution and habitat

The species occurs only on the Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia. It inhabits tropical moist lowland forests, where it prefers thick, humid vegetation along mountain streams and valleys. This bird also has been observed in coconut plantations and on dry slopes covered with mango trees.[2]

Ecology

The species has been reported as nesting in mango trees and decayed hollows of pine trees. Its diet consists of a variety of insects and small vertebrates, mostly lizards.[2]

Conservation

The Marquesan kingfisher is Critically endangered and currently likely numbers less than 500 individuals. The population has rapidly declined in recent decades, and it has become extinct on several smaller islands of the group, being reported only from Tahuata in 2011. Its forest habitat suffers from the presence of introduced species like feral cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and pigs. It is also subject to predation by the introduced great horned owl, the common myna and the black rat.[1][2]

gollark: That is not what I'm talking about and I'm not aware of that happening.
gollark: That's currently all I have to say about Android opensourceness. I might come up with more later.
gollark: Banking apps use this for """security""", mostly, as well as a bunch of other ones because they can.
gollark: Google has a thing called "SafetyNet" which allows apps to refuse to run on unlocked devices. You might think "well, surely you could just patch apps to not check, or make a fake SafetyNet always say yes". And this does work in some cases, but SafetyNet also uploads lots of data about your device to Google servers and has *them* run some proprietary ineffable checks on it and give a cryptographically signed attestation saying "yes, this is an Approved™ device" or "no, it is not", which the app's backend can check regardless of what your device does.
gollark: The situation is also slightly worse than *that*. Now, there is an open source Play Services reimplementation called microG. You can install this if you're running a custom system image, and it pretends to be (via signature spoofing, a feature which the LineageOS team refuse to add because of entirely false "security" concerns, but which is widely available in some custom ROMs anyway) Google Play Services. Cool and good™, yes? But no, not really. Because if your bootloader is unlocked, a bunch of apps won't work for *other* stupid reasons!

References
  1. BirdLife International (2013). "Todiramphus godeffroyi". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2013. Retrieved 26 November 2013.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  2. "Marquesas Kingfisher - Todirhamphus godeffroyi". BirdLife International.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.