Rufous-bellied tit
The rufous-bellied tit is a species of bird in the tit family. It is found in Africa from the Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo and northern Namibia east to Tanzania and northern Mozambique.
Taxonomy
The rufous-bellied tit was formally described in 1877 by the Portuguese zoologist José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage based on a specimen collected near the town of Caconda in central Angola. He placed it with the tits in the genus Parus and coined the binomial name Parus rufiventris. The specific epithet is Modern Latin meaning "red-bellied", from Latin rufus meaning "ruddy" or "rufous" and venter, ventris meaning "belly". The rufous-bellied tit is now one of 14 tits placed in the genus Melaniparus that was introduced in 1850 by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte.Five subspecies are recognised:M. r. rufiventris – south Congo and south DR Congo to central Angola and central ZambiaM. r. masukuensis – southeast DR Congo, east Zambia and MalawiM. r. diligens – south Angola, north Namibia, southwest Zambia and northwest BotswanaM. r. pallidiventris – Tanzania, south Malawi and north MozambiqueM. r. stenotopicus – east Zimbabwe and central west Mozambique
The subspecies M. r. pallidiventris and M. r. stenotopicus have sometimes been considered as a separate species, the cinnamon-breasted tit. It was thought that iris color was a reliable feature to differentiate the two species but a study published in 2015 found that in western Tanzania birds with dark eyes and pale eyes occurred in the same flocks. This suggests that it might be better to consider the cinnamon-breasted tit as a subspecies of the rufous-bellied tit.
Description
This long bird has a black head, breast, wings and tail, grey upperparts, white fringes to the wing feathers, and rufous underparts. The adult has a yellow eye, brown in the duller juvenile.Its habitat is subtropical or tropical dry miombo forests.