Black bulbul
species of bird
The black bulbul (Hypsipetes leucocephalus), also known as the Himalayan black bulbul or Asian black bulbul, is a member of the bulbul family of passerine birds. It is found primarily in the Himalayas, its range stretching from Pakistan eastward to Southeast Asia. It is the type species of the genus Hypsipetes, established by Nicholas Aylward Vigors in the early 1830s. There are a number of subspecies, mostly varying in the shade of the body plumage which ranges from grey to black, and some also occur in white-headed morphs, as also suggested by its specific epithet leucocephalus, literally "white head". The legs and bill are always rich orange-red.
Taxonomy and systematics
The black bulbul was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with the thrushes in the genus Turdus and coined the binomial name Turdus leucocephalus. Gmelin based his account on "Le Merle Dominiquain de la Chine", a white-headed morph from China that had been described in 1782 by the French naturalist Pierre Sonnerat. The type locality was subsequently restricted to Guangzhou (formerly Canton) in China. The black bulbul is now one of 19 species placed in the genus Hypsipetes that was introduced in 1831 by the Irish zoologist Nicholas Vigors.
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The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q998240. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1789, 1782 and 1831.
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This entry incorporates text from “Black bulbul” 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.