Vanuatu white-eye
species of bird
The Vanuatu white-eye or yellow-fronted white-eye (Zosterops flavifrons) is a small passerine bird belonging to the genus Zosterops in the white-eye family Zosteropidae. It is endemic to Vanuatu, where it is one of the most common birds.
Taxonomy
The Vanuatu white-eye 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 flycatchers in the genus Muscicapa and coined the binomial name Muscicapa flavifrons. The specific epithet combines the Latin flavus meaning "yellow" with frons meaning "forehead" or "front". Gmelin based his account on the "Yellow-fronted flycatcher" from the island of Tanna in the Vanuatu archipelago that had been described in 1783 by the English ornithologist John Latham in his book A General Synopsis of Birds. The naturalist Joseph Banks had provided Latham with a water-colour drawing of the bird by the naturalist Georg Forster who had accompanied James Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific Ocean. The picture is dated 7 August 1774. It is the holotype for the species and is now in the collection of the Natural History Museum in London. The Vanuatu white-eye is now placed with over a hundred other white-eye species in the genus Zosterops that was introduced in 1827 by Nicholas Vigors and Thomas Horsfield.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vanuatu white-eye” 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.