Glossy-backed drongo
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Family
Genus
SPECIES
Dicrurus divaricatus

The glossy-backed drongo (Dicrurus divaricatus ) is a species of bird in the family Dicruridae. It occurs in sub-Saharan Africa from south Mauritania and Senegambia across to Somalia and northern Kenya.

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The glossy-backed drongo was described by the German naturalist Hinrich Lichtenstein in 1823 from a specimen obtained in Senegambia. He coined the binomial name Muscicapa divaricata. It was formerly treated as a subspecies of the fork-tailed drongo (Dicrurus adsimilis ) but it is now considered as a separate species based on the phylogenetic relationships determined in a molecular study published in 2018.

There are two subspecies:

  • D. d. divaricatus ( Lichtenstein, MHK, 1823) – Senegambia and south Mauritania to southwest Chad
  • D. d. lugubris (Hemprich & Ehrenberg, 1828) – south Chad to Eritrea, Ethiopia, north Kenya, and north Somalia

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Geography

References

1. Glossy-backed drongo Wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossy-backed_drongo
2. Xeno-canto bird call - https://xeno-canto.org/510536

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