The blue-faced honeyeater is the only member of its genus. It is most closely related to honeyeaters of the genus Melithreptus. Its plumage is distinctive, with olive upperparts, white underparts, and a black head and throat. Adults have a blue area of bare skin on each side of the face.
About Blue-faced honeyeater in brief
The blue-faced honeyeater is the only member of its genus. It is most closely related to honeyeaters of the genus Melithreptus. Its plumage is distinctive, with olive upperparts, white underparts, and a black head and throat with white nape and cheeks. Adults have a blue area of bare skin on each side of the face readily distinguishing them from juveniles. Found in open woodland, parks and gardens, it is common in northern and eastern Australia, and southern New Guinea. It appears to be sedentary in parts of its range, and locally nomadic in other parts; however, the species has been little studied. Its diet is mostly composed of invertebrates, supplemented with nectar and fruit. They often take over and renovate old babbler nests, in which the female lays and incubates two or rarely three eggs. Its propensity for feeding on bananas in north Queensland has given it the common name of banana-bird. A local name from Mackay in central Queensland is pandanus-bird, which means’shouldered kruk’ or’mustered kruek’ It is also called yeewi in Pakhha, where it is always found around palms and is a qualifier for the bushman’s’miner’ It was first described by ornithologist John Latham in his 1801 work, Supplementum Indicis Ornithologici, sive Systematis Ornithologiae.
However, he described it as three separate species, seemingly not knowing it was the same bird in each case: the blue-eared grackle, theblue-cheeked bee-eater, and the blue’sucker. It was painted between 1788 and 1797 by Thomas Watling, one of a group known collectively as the Port Jackson Painter. The specific epithet, cyanotis, means ‘blue-eared’, and combines cyano-κυανο ‘blue’ with otis ‘ear’ and Entomiza in an 1837 publication, and George Gray wrote Entomyza in 1840. The generic name is derived from the Ancient Greek ento-εντο- ‘inside’ and myzeinμυζene ‘to drink’ or ‘suck’ It is a common name in northern Queensland, but the term was also applied to the black-shouldered gugur, which is also known as the gugur-gangger, or der-ro-gangge, from John Hunter’s der-gang-gang, meaning’meat-eating gugur’ It has three subspecies: cyanotis griseigularis intergrade zone albipennis, cyanousMerops cyanops, and Gracula cyanot isTurdus cyanous. A 2004 molecular study has resolved that it is closelyrelated to Melith reptus after all.
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This page is based on the article Blue-faced honeyeater published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 07, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
