The Amami woodcock (''Scolopax mira'') is a medium-sized

wader 245px, A flock of Dunlins and Red knots">Red_knot.html" ;"title="Dunlins and Red knot">Dunlins and Red knots Waders or shorebirds are birds of the order Charadriiformes commonly found wikt:wade#Etymology 1, wading along shorelines and mudflat ...

. It is slightly larger and longer-legged than

Eurasian woodcock The Eurasian woodcock (''Scolopax rusticola'') is a medium-small wading bird found in temperate and subarctic Eurasia. It has cryptic camouflage to suit its woodland habitat, with reddish-brown upperparts and buff-coloured underparts. Its eyes ...

, and may be

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 ...

. This species is a

restricted-range endemic An Endemic Bird Area (EBA) is an area of land identified by BirdLife International as being important for habitat-based bird conservation because it contains the habitats of restricted-range bird species (''see below for definition''), which are th ...

found only in forests on two small islands of the

Amami Islands The The name ''Amami-guntō'' was standardized on February 15, 2010. Prior to that, another name, ''Amami shotō'' (奄美諸島), was also used. is an archipelago in the Satsunan Islands, which is part of the Ryukyu Islands, and is southwest o ...

chain in South

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

. Insofar as its habits are known, they are similar to Eurasian woodcock.

Taxonomy and systematics

The Amami woodcock was originally described as a subspecies of the

, due to a juvenile that resembled the Eurasian woodcock in coloration. Later, some argued that the Amami woodcock was a distinct species—Kobayashi in 1979 and

Cramp A cramp is a sudden, involuntary, painful skeletal muscle contraction or overshortening associated with electrical activity; while generally temporary and non-damaging, they can cause significant pain and a paralysis-like immobility of the aff ...

& Simmons in 1983. Comparison between the two species revealed their distinct physical features, and led to the emergence of the Amami woodcock as a distinct species.

References

External links

BirdLife Species Factsheet.
Scolopax Endemic birds of Japan Birds of the Ryukyu Islands Wading birds Birds described in 1916 Taxa named by Ernst Hartert {{charadriiformes-stub

Taxonomy and systematics

References

Further reading

External links