Endangered
Sri Lanka Whistling Thrush
Myophonus blighi
The Sri Lanka whistling thrush is a whistling thrush in the family Muscicapidae.
Appearance
The female is brown above and chestnut below, but has a bright blue shoulder patch like the male.
This is a small whistling thrush, at only 20 cm.
Range and habitat
It is a resident endemic bird in Sri Lanka. It is found in the highlands of Sri Lanka in jungle or other dense forest near water. It is omnivorous, eating a wide range of insects, frogs, earthworms and berries.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
It lays one or two eggs in a neat cup-shaped nest in a bush or on a ledge near water. This is a notoriously difficult species to see, even when the males are singing in the breeding season, that starts in February.
In crisis
It is very shy, scarce, localised and declining due to habitat loss.
Sri Lanka Whistling Thrush 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 Sri Lanka Whistling Thrush, Wikidata item Q605496. 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.
