''Tarsiger'' is a genus of six species of

bird Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweigh ...

s 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 Norther ...

. They are small, mostly brightly coloured

insectivorous A robber fly eating a hoverfly An insectivore is a carnivorous animal or plant that eats insects. An alternative term is entomophage, which can also refer to the human practice of eating insects. The first vertebrate insectivores were ...

birds native to

Asia Asia (, ) is one of the world's most notable geographical regions, which is either considered a continent in its own right or a subcontinent of Eurasia, which shares the continental landmass of Afro-Eurasia with Africa. Asia covers an area ...

and (one species) northeastern

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

; four of the six species are confined to the Sino-Himalayan mountain system. The genus has sometimes been included within the related genus ''

Luscinia ''Luscinia '' is a genus of smallish passerine birds, containing the nightingales and relatives. Formerly classed as members of the thrush family Turdidae, they are now considered to be Old World flycatchers (Muscicapidae) of the chat subfamily ...

'', but the species have been found to form a distinct

monophyletic In cladistics for a group of organisms, monophyly is the condition of being a clade—that is, a group of taxa composed only of a common ancestor (or more precisely an ancestral population) and all of its lineal descendants. Monophyletic gro ...

group.

Taxonomy

The genus ''Tarsiger'' was introduced in 1845 by the English naturalist

Brian Houghton Hodgson Brian Houghton Hodgson (1 February 1800 or more likely 1801 – 23 May 1894) was a pioneer naturalist and ethnologist working in India and Nepal where he was a British Resident. He described numerous species of birds and mammals from the Himala ...

with the golden bush robin as the

type species In zoological nomenclature, a type species (''species typica'') is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the species that contains the biological type specimen ...

. The genus name is from

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

''tarsos'', "flat of the foot" and

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

''gerere'', "to carry". The genus contains the following species: * White-browed bush robin (''Tarsiger indicus'') *

Rufous-breasted bush robin The rufous-breasted bush robin (''Tarsiger hyperythrus'') is a species of bird in the family Muscicapidae. It is found in Bangladesh, Bhutan, southwestern China, northeast India, northern Myanmar and Nepal. Its natural habitat is temperate forest ...

(''Tarsiger hyperythrus'') *

Collared bush robin The collared bush robin or Johnstone's robin (''Tarsiger johnstoniae'') is a species of bird in the family Muscicapidae. It is endemic to Taiwan, living in montane and subalpine forests. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) h ...

(''Tarsiger johnstoniae'') *

Red-flanked bluetail The red-flanked bluetail (''Tarsiger cyanurus''), also known as the orange-flanked bush-robin, is a small passerine bird that was formerly classed as a member of the thrush family Turdidae, but is now more generally considered to be an Old World ...

(''Tarsiger cyanurus'') * Himalayan bluetail (''Tarsiger rufilatus'') * Golden bush robin (''Tarsiger chrysaeus'') The Himalayan bluetail was formerly treated as a

subspecies In biological classification, subspecies is a rank below species, used for populations that live in different areas and vary in size, shape, or other physical characteristics (morphology), but that can successfully interbreed. Not all species ...

of the red-flanked bluetail. It was split on the basis of its more intense plumage colours, and its ecology and behaviour, being a short-distance altitudinal migrant not a long-distance migrant. The phylogenetic relationships between the species were determined in a

molecular phylogenetic Molecular phylogenetics () is the branch of phylogeny that analyzes genetic, hereditary molecular differences, predominantly in DNA sequences, to gain information on an organism's evolutionary relationships. From these analyses, it is possible to ...

study published in 2022:

References

Bird genera Taxonomy articles created by Polbot {{Muscicapidae-stub