The yellow-breasted forest robin (''Stiphrornis xanthogaster''), also known as the eastern forest robin, is a species of

passerine A passerine () is any bird of the order Passeriformes (; from Latin 'sparrow' and '-shaped') which includes more than half of all bird species. Sometimes known as perching birds, passerines generally have an anisodactyl arrangement of their ...

bird in the family

Muscicapidae The Old World flycatchers are a large family, the Muscicapidae, of small passerine birds restricted to the Old World (Europe, Africa and Asia), with the exception of several vagrants and two species, bluethroat (''Luscinia svecica'') and north ...

that is found at low levels in forests from

Cameroon Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It shares boundaries with Nigeria to the west and north, Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the R ...

and

Gabon Gabon ( ; ), officially the Gabonese Republic (), is a country on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa, on the equator, bordered by Equatorial Guinea to the northwest, Cameroon to the north, the Republic of the Congo to the east and south, and ...

DR Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), also known as the DR Congo, Congo-Kinshasa, or simply the Congo (the last ambiguously also referring to the neighbouring Republic of the Congo), is a country in Central Africa. By land area, it is t ...

and

Uganda Uganda, officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered to the east by Kenya, to the north by South Sudan, to the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to the south-west by Rwanda, and to the ...

. In 1999 it was recommended that it should be treated as a separate species instead of a subspecies.

Taxonomy

The yellow-breasted forest robin 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 1903 by the English ornithologist

Richard Bowdler Sharpe Richard Bowdler Sharpe (22 November 1847 – 25 December 1909) was an English people, English zoologist and ornithology, ornithologist who worked as curator of the bird collection at the British Museum of natural history. In the course of his car ...

under the current

binomial name In taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, both of which use Latin grammatical forms, altho ...

''Stiphrornis xanthogaster'' based on a specimen collected on the banks of the

Dja River The Dja River (also known as the Ngoko River) is a stream in west-central Africa. It forms part of Cameroon–Republic of Congo border and has a course of roughly . Rising southeast of the southeastern Cameroon town of Abong-Mbang, the Dja Fauna ...

in Cameroon. The specific epithet combines the

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Greek ...

ξανθος/''xanthos'' meaning "yellow" with γαστηρ/''gastēr'' meaning "belly". Three

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 ...

are recognised: * ''S. x. xanthogaster'' Sharpe, 1903 – southeast Cameroon and northeast Gabon to north, central DR Congo and south Uganda * ''S. x. sanghensis'' Beresford & Cracraft, 1999 – southwest Central African Republic * ''S. x. rudderi'' Voelker, Tobler, Prestridge, Duijm, Groenenberg, Martin, AD, Nieman & Roselaar & Huntley, 2017 – central north DR Congo

References

Stiphrornis Birds described in 1883 {{Muscicapidae-stub