The Bougainville thrush (''Zoothera atrigena'') is a species of bird in the thrush family

Turdidae The thrushes are a passerine bird family, Turdidae, with a worldwide distribution. The family was once much larger before biologists reclassified the former subfamily Saxicolinae, which includes the chats and European robins, as Old World flyca ...

. It is found in the montane forests of

Bougainville Island Bougainville Island (; Tok Pisin: ''Bogenvil'') is the main island of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, which is part of Papua New Guinea. Its land area is . The highest point is Mount Balbi, on the main island, at . The much smaller Buk ...

in the

Solomon Islands Archipelago The Solomon Islands (archipelago) is an island group in the western South Pacific Ocean, north-east of Australia. The archipelago is in the Melanesian subregion and bioregion of Oceania and forms the eastern boundary of the Solomon Sea. Th ...

. It was formerly considered to be

conspecific Biological specificity is the tendency of a characteristic such as a behavior or a biochemical variation to occur in a particular species. Biochemist Linus Pauling stated that "Biological specificity is the set of characteristics of living organism ...

with the

New Britain thrush The New Britain thrush (''Zoothera talaseae'') is a species of bird in the thrush family Turdidae. It is found in the montane forests on the Papua New Guinean islands of New Britain and Umboi. The Bougainville thrush was formerly considered t ...

with the combined taxa known as the black-backed thrush.

Taxonomy

The Bougainville thrush was

formally described A species description is a formal scientific description of a newly encountered species, typically articulated through a scientific publication. Its purpose is to provide a clear description of a new species of organism and explain how it differ ...

in 1982 by Dillon Ripley and Don Hadden from a specimen collected at an altitude of on

Papua New Guinea Papua New Guinea, officially the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, is an island country in Oceania that comprises the eastern half of the island of New Guinea and offshore islands in Melanesia, a region of the southwestern Pacific Ocean n ...

. They considered it to be a

subspecies In Taxonomy (biology), biological classification, subspecies (: subspecies) is a rank below species, used for populations that live in different areas and vary in size, shape, or other physical characteristics (Morphology (biology), morpholog ...

of the black-backed thrush (now renamed the

) and coined the

trinomial name In biology, trinomial nomenclature is the system of names for taxa below the rank of species. These names have three parts. The usage is different in zoology and botany. In zoology In zoological nomenclature, a trinomen (), trinominal name, or t ...

''Zoothera talaseae atrigena''. The epithet ''atrigena'' combines

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

''ater'' meaning "black" with ''gena'' meaning "cheek". The Bougainville thrush is now considered to be a separate species based on its distinctive morphology.

References

Birds described in 1982 Birds of Bougainville Island Endemic fauna of Papua New Guinea Bougainville thrush {{Turdidae-stub