Qilian bluetail
species of bird
The Qilian bluetail (Tarsiger albocoeruleus) is a small passerine bird in the Old World flycatcher family Muscicapidae that is found in north-central China. It formerly considered as conspecific with the red-flanked bluetail (Tarsiger cyanurus).
Taxonomy
The Qilian bluetail was formally described in 1937 by the German ornithologist Wilhelm Meise as a subspecies of Tarsiger cyanurus, the red-flanked bluetail. The epithet albocoeruleus combines the Latin albus meaning "white" with caeruleus meaning "blue". It was previously usually considered a synonym of T. cyanurus, until accepted by Hadoram Shirihai and Lars Svensson in 2018, and it was proposed to be a full species in a molecular phylogenetic study published in 2022. It has now been recognised by the IOC World Bird List, and the ebird/Clements Checklist. It is distinctive in genetics and vocalisation, but only marginally different in morphology. The males have bluer fore-supercilium, and less white than in red-flanked bluetail.
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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 Sep 11, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q114258298. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1937, 2018 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Qilian bluetail” 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.