African shrike-flycatcher
species of bird
The African shrike-flycatcher or red-eyed shrike-flycatcher (Megabyas flammulatus) is a species of bird in the vanga family Vangidae. It is the only species in the monotypic genus Megabyas.
Taxonomy
The African shrike-flycatcher was described by the French naturalists Jules Verreaux and Édouard Verreaux in 1855, who placed it in its own genus, Megabyas. Over the years, the species was sometimes lumped with the closely related black-and-white shrike-flycatcher in the genus Bias, another widespread African species similar in size, plumage and skull shape. The genus name is derived from the Ancient Greek word mega for large and Bias for the genus it was evidently related to.
The African shrike-flycatcher was once lumped with many other families of birds in Muscicapidae, the Old World flycatchers. Within that enlarged family, it was placed with the monarch-flycatchers until 1970 when it was identified as closer to the wattle-eye and batises in the present day family Platysteiridae. A 2004 analysis of the genetics of the species along with other members of the family showed that it, along with the genus Bias, were actually embedded in the Vangidae, a family previously thought to be endemic to the island of Madagascar. The same study confirmed that Megabyas and Bias are closely related but diverged sufficiently to be retained in two separate genera.
Two subspecies of African shrike-flycatcher are currently accepted, the nominate race in West Africa and M. f.
“African shrike-flycatcher” enters the record as species of bird. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what African, shrike-flycatcher and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1308363. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1855, 1970 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “African shrike-flycatcher” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.