The spotted scrubwren (''Sericornis maculatus'') is a

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 ...

species In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate s ...

native to coastal southern Australia, from

Adelaide Adelaide ( ) is the capital city of South Australia, the state's largest city and the fifth-most populous city in Australia. "Adelaide" may refer to either Greater Adelaide (including the Adelaide Hills) or the Adelaide city centre. The dem ...

westwards to

Shark Bay Shark Bay (Malgana: ''Gathaagudu'', "two waters") is a World Heritage Site in the Gascoyne region of Western Australia. The http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/places/world/shark-bay area is located approximately north of Perth, on the ...

in Western Australia. It was formerly considered

conspecific Biological specificity is the tendency of a characteristic such as a behavior or a biochemical variation to occur in a particular species. Biochemist Linus Pauling stated that "Biological specificity is the set of characteristics of living organ ...

with the

white-browed scrubwren The white-browed scrubwren (''Sericornis frontalis'') is a passerine bird found on the New England Tablelands and coastal areas of Australia. Placed in the family (biology), family Pardalotidae in the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy, this has met with o ...

, and is known to hybridize with that species where their ranges overlap in the Adelaide area. Genetic analysis in a 2018 study of the family found that this taxon was more divergent from the white-browed scrubwren than the

Tasmanian ) , nickname = , image_map = Tasmania in Australia.svg , map_caption = Location of Tasmania in AustraliaCoordinates: , subdivision_type = Country , subdi ...

Atherton scrubwren The Atherton scrubwren (''Sericornis keri'') is a bird species. Placed in the family Pardalotidae in the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy, this has met with opposition and indeed is now known to be wrong; they rather belong to the independent family Ac ...

s and hence proposed its reclassification as a species. It was reclassified as a species in 2019.

Taxonomy

''Sericornis maculatus'' includes the following subspecies:Gill F, D Donsker & P Rasmussen (Eds). 2020. IOC World Bird List (v10.2). doi : 10.14344/IOC.ML.10.2. * ''S. m. ashbyi'' - Mathews, 1912 * ''S. m. mellori'' - Mathews, 1912 * ''S. m. maculatus'' - Gould, 1847 * ''S. m. balstoni'' - Ogilvie-Grant, 1909

References

Sericornis Birds of Western Australia Birds described in 1847 Birds of South Australia {{Acanthizidae-stub