Although the
spotted catbird is a conspicuous part of the Wet Tropics avifauna, the species
was not described from Australia. Alfred Russel Wallace collected specimens of
these and many other species of birds, insects and land snails on the Aru
Islands in the Arafura Sea and sent them to British Museum. (Wallace’s work on
the Aru Islands led to his first systematic study of biogeography.)
Ornithologist
George Gray named the species Ptilonorhynchus melanotis, acknowledging a
relationship with the satin bowerbird (P. violaceus). It was subsequently
shifted to Ailuroedus alongside the southern green catbird (A. crassirostris).
The first Australian spotted catbird was not collected for seventeen years
after Wallace’s expedition to the Aru Islands, when Kendall Broadbent sent specimens
from Rockingham Bay to the Australian Museum. Edward Ramsay described the
Queensland form as a new species, Aeluroedus maculosus. Ramsay’s species is now
considered one of two Australian subspecies of Ailuroedus melanotis. (The other
is A. melanotis joanae from eastern Cape York Peninsula.)
Not that
this matters one jot to the spotted catbirds. The ones in my garden spend their
days looking for food and engaging in musical battles over territories. (I use
the term ‘musical’ very loosely.) They are almost certainly sitting on eggs, if
not already feeding nestlings. I suspect the latter because they have resumed
their mugging activities on the pademelons. They are yet to take on the brush
turkeys, but that will happen once the nestlings grow big enough. It is
definitely a jungle out there.
References
Gray, G.R.
(1858) A list of the birds, with descriptions of new species, obtained by Mr
Alfred R. Wallace in the Aru and Ke Islands. Proceedings of the Zoological
Society of London 1858: 169 – 198.
Ramsay,
E.P. (1874). Descriptions of five new species of birds from Queensland, and of
the egg of Chlamydodera maculata. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of
London 1874: 601 – 605.
