The speckled nightingale-thrush or Sclater's nightingale-thrush (''Catharus maculatus'') is a species of bird in the thrush family

Turdidae The thrushes are a passerine bird family, Turdidae, with a worldwide distribution. The family was once much larger before biologists reclassified the former subfamily Saxicolinae, which includes the chats and European robins, as Old World flycat ...

native to South America.

Taxonomy

The speckled nightingale-thrush was first described in 1858 by

Philip Sclater Philip Lutley Sclater (4 November 1829 – 27 June 1913) was an England, English lawyer and zoologist. In zoology, he was an expert ornithologist, and identified the main zoogeographic regions of the world. He was Secretary of the Zoological ...

as ''Malacocichla maculatus''. In 1879 it was subsumed 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 spotted nightingale-thrush, as ''Cantharus dryas maculatus''. In 2017, it was argued based on

phylogenetic In biology, phylogenetics (; from Greek φυλή/ φῦλον [] "tribe, clan, race", and wikt:γενετικός, γενετικός [] "origin, source, birth") is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among or within groups o ...

analysis of

mitochondrial DNA Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA or mDNA) is the DNA located in mitochondria, cellular organelles within eukaryotic cells that convert chemical energy from food into a form that cells can use, such as adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Mitochondrial D ...

, morphometric and vocal data analyses, and modeling of

ecological niche In ecology, a niche is the match of a species to a specific environmental condition. Three variants of ecological niche are described by It describes how an organism or population responds to the distribution of resources and competitors (for ...

s, that it should again be considered a separate species. The former "spotted nightingale-thrush" (''Catharus dryas sensu lato'') was split into the speckled nightingale-thrush (''C. maculatus'') and the

yellow-throated nightingale-thrush The yellow-throated nightingale-thrush or Gould's nightingale-thrush (''Catharus dryas'') is a species of bird in the family Turdidae native to Central America. It was first described in 1855 by English ornithologist John Gould. Taxonomy and sys ...

(''C. dryas sensu stricto'').

References

{{Taxonbar, from1=Q49000970, from2=Q27630989 Catharus Birds described in 1858 Taxa named by Philip Sclater