Critically Endangered
Gurney's Pitta
Hydrornis gurneyi
Gurney's pitta is a medium-sized passerine bird.
Appearance
The male has a blue crown and black-and-yellow underparts. The rest of the head is black, and it has warm brown upperparts. The female has a brown crown and buffy-whitish underparts.
Published measurements include mass about 71.
Range and habitat
No country pin is stored for Gurney's Pitta on this catalog. That is a missing field, not proof the animal has no range.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
It breeds in the Malay Peninsula, with populations mainly in Myanmar. Its diet consists of slugs, insects, and earthworms.
In crisis
Gurney's pitta is endangered. It was initially thought to be extinct for some time after 1952, but was rediscovered in 1986. Its population was estimated at a mere nine pairs in 1997, then believed one of the rarest bird species on earth.
This granted the species a reassessment from the IUCN, going from critically endangered to endangered. Later on, further research completed in Burma by 2009 provides strong evidence that its global population is much greater than previously estimated, owing to the discovery of several new territories in this country The pitta was voted the "most wanted bird in Thailand" by bird watchers visiting that country.
Gurney's Pitta is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Gurney's Pitta, Wikidata item Q534594. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
