Grey noddy
species of bird
The grey noddy or grey ternlet (Anous albivitta) is a seabird belonging to the family Laridae. It was once regarded as a pale morph of the blue noddy (Anous ceruleus) but is now usually considered to be a separate species.
Taxonomy
The first formal description of the grey noddy was by the French ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1856 under the binomial name Procelsterna albivitta. The specific name albivitta is from the Latin abus for "white" and vitta for "band" or "head-band".
The grey noddy was formerly placed in the genus Procelsterna. A molecular phylogenetic study published in 2016 found that the five noddies formed a single clade with the grey noddy and blue noddy in Procelsterna nested within the species in the genus Anous. The authors proposed that the noddies should be merged into a single genus Anous and that Procelsterna should be considered as a junior synonym.
Three subspecies are recognised:
A. a. albivitta (Bonaparte, 1856): Lord Howe, Norfolk and Kermadec Islands, Tonga
A. a. skottsbergii (Lönnberg, 1921): Henderson, Easter, and Isla Salas y Gómez Islands (west of Chile)
A. a.
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This entry incorporates text from “Grey noddy” 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.