Systematic notes on Asian birds. 21. Babbler jungle: a re-evaluation of the ‘pyrrogenys’ group of Asian pellorneines (Timaliidae)

The taxonomy of the jungle babblers, Delacour’s tribe Pellorneini, has long been subject to reversals of opinion, suggestive of a still-poor understanding of natural relationships. At the unstable boundary of genera Trichastoma and Pellorneum, groups of taxa usually taken to comprise a continental species tickelli and an insular species pyrrogenys have shifted from positions in separate genera to being neighbours in first one and then the other of these two. A fresh morphological analysis and newly described vocalizations show them to be one another’s probable closest relative, potentially conspecific but due to limitations on the allowable use of vocalization evidence among allopatric populations, for the time being at least, kept as separate entities. The Sumatran taxon buettikoferi, long held to be a subspecies of one or other of these two, has unique songs and a sufficient array of other peculiarities to be treated unequivocally as a full species, perhaps not more closely related than as sister species to the whole of the rest of the cluster.