Endangered
Banasura laughingthrush
Montecincla jerdoni
Banasura laughingthrush is a perching bird in the family Leiothrichidae (order Passeriformes) — Montecincla jerdoni, recorded as Endangered and tied to India.
Appearance
Adults have a black face and throat. White supercilia; a gray breast, cheeks, and back; an ochre belly, and olive back, wings, and tail. Additionally, adults have a black bill, crimson irises, and brownish legs. It is distinguished from the Nilgiri laughingthrush by its gray breast, and from the Palani and Ashambu laughingthrushes by its black chin.
The Banasura laughingthrush is a medium-sized songbird, ranging between 203 and 230 cm in length, and between 36 and 52 g in mass.
Range and habitat
The Banasura laughingthrush has an extremely restricted range. It is endemic to a small series of sky islands in the Western Ghats in South India, between the Brahmagiri Hills of Kodagu in the north and Vavul Mala in Kerala in the south. Within this range, fragmented populations are found at Banasura Hill in Wayanad, Chembra Peak, and Vellarimala.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet
The Banasura laughingthrush forages in the shola midstory and lower canopy by hopping among branches, feeding primarily on fruits and insects.
In crisis
Due to its extremely small range of under 57 km², the population of the Banasura laughingthrush is estimated at only around 500-2,500 adults. The Banasura laughingthrush's range is also highly fragmented, rendering the species even more vulnerable to declines due to habitat loss and degradation. Due to its small population size and range, the species is ranked by the IUCN as Endangered.
Banasura laughingthrush is 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 Banasura laughingthrush, Wikidata item Q62123280. 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.
