The pale-bellied white-eye (''Zosterops consobrinorum'') is a 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 ...

in the family

Zosteropidae The white-eyes are a family, Zosteropidae, of small passerine birds native to tropical, subtropical and temperate Sub-Saharan Africa, southern and eastern Asia, and Australasia. White-eyes inhabit most tropical islands in the Indian Ocean, the ...

. It is

endemic Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsew ...

to SE

Sulawesi Sulawesi (), also known as Celebes (), is an island in Indonesia. One of the four Greater Sunda Islands, and the world's eleventh-largest island, it is situated east of Borneo, west of the Maluku Islands, and south of Mindanao and the Sulu Ar ...

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

. Its natural

habitat In ecology, the term habitat summarises the array of resources, physical and biotic factors that are present in an area, such as to support the survival and reproduction of a particular species. A species habitat can be seen as the physical ...

subtropical or tropical moist lowland forest Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests (TSMF), also known as tropical moist forest, is a subtropical and tropical forest habitat type defined by the World Wide Fund for Nature. Description TSMF is generally found in large, discont ...

. The species has a limited distribution and also appears to be sensitive to human disturbance.

Taxonomy and systematics

Although not yet recognized as a subspecies of the pale-bellied white-eye, in 2003 a similar bird was discovered near the village of Wanci on

Wangi-wangi Island Wangi-wangi Island is in the north-west cluster of the Tukangbesi Islands, and is the seat of the Wakatobi Regency, part of the province of Southeast Sulawesi. It covers an area of 191 km2 and had an estimated 60,000 inhabitants in mid 2021. To t ...

and provisionally named the Wangi-Wangi white-eye (''

Zosterops ''Zosterops'' (meaning "eye-girdle") is a genus of passerine birds containing the typical white-eyes in the white-eye family Zosteropidae. The genus has the largest number of species in the white-eye family. They occur in the Afrotropical, Indo ...

sp. nov.''). This island is its only known home and is part of the

Tukangbesi Islands Tukangbesi Islands, is a group of islands off the coast of Sulawesi immediately east of Buton island in the Banda Sea region, and part of Sulawesi Tenggara. "Tukang Besi" literally means "iron worker" or "blacksmith" in Indonesian. There is a T ...

to the southeast of

. The Wangi-Wangi white-eye has a number of differences from the pale-bellied white-eye including larger size, a black body, a long yellow beak, a gray breast and pale feet. Like most white-eyes it has a white ring around the eye and green upperparts.

References

Birds described in 1904 Endemic birds of Sulawesi Zosterops Taxonomy articles created by Polbot {{Zosteropidae-stub