Sentinel lark
species of bird
The sentinel lark (Corypha athi) is a species of lark in the family Alaudidae found in Kenya and Tanzania. It was formerly treated as a subspecies of the rufous-naped lark.
Taxonomy
The sentinel lark was formally described in 1900 by the German ornithologist Ernst Hartert based on a specimen collected on the plains of the Athi River in Kenya. He considered it to be a subspecies of the rufous-naped lark and coined the trinomial name Mirafra africana athi. The sentinel lark is now treated as a separate species and placed in the genus Corypha. This placement is based on the results of two molecular phylogenetic studies by a team of ornithologists led by Per Alström that were published in 2023 and 2024.
Two subspecies are recognised:
C. a. athi (Hartert, EJO, 1900) – central Kenya to northeast Tanzania
C. a.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sentinel lark” 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.