Bougainville thrush
species of bird

The Bougainville thrush (Zoothera atrigena) is a species of bird in the thrush family Turdidae. It is found in the montane forests of Bougainville Island in the Solomon Islands Archipelago.
It was formerly considered to be conspecific with the New Britain thrush with the combined taxa known as the black-backed thrush.
Taxonomy
The Bougainville thrush was formally described in 1982 by Dillon Ripley and Don Hadden from a specimen collected at an altitude of 1,500 m (4,900 ft) on Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea. They considered it to be a subspecies of the black-backed thrush (now renamed the New Britain thrush) and coined the trinomial name Zoothera talaseae atrigena. The epithet atrigena combines Latin ater meaning "black" with gena meaning "cheek". The Bougainville thrush is now considered to be a separate species based on its distinctive morphology.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bougainville thrush” 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.