The variegated fairywren was originally described by Nicholas Aylward Vigors and Thomas Horsfield in 1827. It is one of eleven species of the genus Malurus found in Australia and lowland New Guinea. The species is a cooperative breeding species, with small groups of birds maintaining and defending small territories year-round.
About Variegated fairywren in brief
The variegated fairywren was originally described by Nicholas Aylward Vigors and Thomas Horsfield in 1827. It is one of eleven species of the genus Malurus found in Australia and lowland New Guinea. The species is a cooperative breeding species, with small groups of birds maintaining and defending small territories year-round. The brightly coloured breeding male has chestnut shoulders and azure crown and ear coverts. Non-breeding males, females and juveniles have predominantly grey-brown plumage, although females of two subspecies have mainly blue-grey plumage. These birds are primarily insectivorous and forage and live in the shelter of scrubby vegetation east of the Great Dividing Range. Populations across central, northern and western Australia were considered subspecies of this species until 2018, when they were reclassified as the purple-backed Fairywren. It was formerly known as thevariegated wren, until 1978 when the RAOU pushed for the current name to be used. The scientific name commemorates the British collector Aylmer Bourke Lambert.
It’s also known as Lambert’s wren. Like other fairyw Rens, the variegate fairy wren is unrelated to the true wrens. It belongs to a group of four very similar species known collectively as chestnut-shouldered fairywRens. There are well-defined borders between them and the other chestnuts- shouldered wrenS in the group, which are the lovely fairy Wrens, red-winged fairyWren, and the blue-breasted fairywens. Ancestral birds spread south and colonised the southwest during a warm wetter period around 2 million years ago at the end of the Pliocene or beginning of the Pleistocene. Subsequent cooler and drier conditions resulted in loss of habitat and fragmentation of populations. Further warmer, humid conditions again allowed birds to spread southwards, this group occupying central southern Australia east to the Eyre Peninsula. After the end. of the last glacial period 12,000–13,000 years ago, the northern variegates again spread southward, resulting in the Purple-backed fairywen.
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This page is based on the article Variegated fairywren published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
