EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

Black Butcherbird Wearing Rufous

Black Butcherbird (Melloria [Cracticus] quoyi rufescens), Family Artamidae
Kuranda, Queensland, Australia

Explanation:  Found in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, and here in a tiny sliver of very northern and northeastern Australia, is the Black Butcherbird.  But ... this specimen is not black, why?  And why is it called a butcher?  

For the first question, this seems to be the rufous morph (rufescens) of the species, found only in coastal Queensland of northeastern Australia, although immatures also can appear in rufous garb.  And adults are, well, very black, all over except for their gray beak that is nonetheless tipped with black.  

For the second question, Black Butcherbirds are named after their feeding habit of approaching or luring in unsuspecting prey by mimicking the calls of other birds or even humans ... and then seizing the prey and impaling it onto thorns or crevices for later feeding, in a way that some shrikes do elsewhere (an interesting bit of parallel behavioral evolution between unrelated species).  

I encountered this specimen in the tropical forests of so-named Cassowary House in Queensland, which we also visited in a recent EPOW episode for a different avian encounter.  

Black Butcherbirds used to be put into the genus Cracticus, but research (Cake et al. 2018) demonstrated their likeness to the Australian Magpie and related species so that all were included in the expanded genus Melloria.  

   
Information:
    Cake, M., A. Black, and L. Joseph.  2018.  The generic taxonomy of the Australian Magpie and Australo-Papuan butcherbirds is not all black-and-white.  Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club 138(4):346-359. https://doi.org/10.25226/bboc.v138i4.2018.a6