Endangered
Rufous-headed Robin
Larvivora ruficeps
Rufous-headed Robin is a perching bird in the family Muscicapidae (order Passeriformes) — Larvivora ruficeps, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
This is a small robin (average length 15 cm) with an orange-rufous head, a black face, and a white throat with black bordering. Back, upper breast and flanks are grey, most of the belly and underparts are white. The tail is black with rufous fringes and blackish tips to the outer feathers.
Published measurements include mass about 18.
Range and habitat
The species has been recorded from only seven confirmed or probable breeding sites in the Qin Mountains of Sichuan and southern Shaanxi, and is also known from a very few scattered migrant records. It inhabits mixed coniferous and deciduous forest and scrubland in a very narrow altitude band (2,400-2,800 m above sea level), apparently making use of successional scrub in valley bottom areas subject to flash-floods. Using known breeding records of the rufous-headed robin, ecological niche modeling predicts that there should be suitable habitats for this species in north and central Sichuan, south Gansu, south Shaanxi and south-east Tibet.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Habits
Perching birds hold with three toes forward and one back. A named island starling or leafbird in this catalog is a wild population, not a cage type.
In crisis
This poorly known species is thought to be threatened by habitat loss. Populations of the rufous-headed robin appear to be on the decline. The species was classified by the IUCN as Vulnerable until 2012 and was uplisted to Endangered in 2013, based on the rarity of recent sightings, that is taken to indicate an ongoing population decline.
The main threats are believed to be habitat loss and degradation, likely exacerbated to an unknown degree by the capture of live specimens for the caged bird trade.
Rufous-headed Robin 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 Rufous-headed Robin, Wikidata item Q27075674. 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.
