Masked laughingthrush



The masked laughingthrush (Pterorhinus perspicillatus) is a species of laughingthrush found in China and Vietnam. It is often seen in small noisy flocks of seven. Its Chinese name [七姊妹 qī zǐ-mèi] means 'seven sisters'.

Taxonomy
The masked laughingthrush was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with the thrushes in the genus Turdus and coined the binomial name Turdus perspicillatus. The specific epithet perspicillatus is Modern Latin meaning "spectacled". Gmelin based his description on "Le Merle de la Chine" that had been described in 1775 by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. A hand-coloured engraving by François-Nicolas Martinet was published to accompany Buffon's text. The type locality is now restricted to Xiamen (formerly Amoy) in the province of Fujian.

The masked laughingthrush was formerly placed in the genus Garrulax but following the publication of a comprehensive molecular phylogenetic study of the laughingthrushes in 2018, it was moved to the resurrected genus Pterorhinus that had been introduced by the English zoologist Robert Swinhoe in 1868. The species is monotypic: no subspecies are recognised.