The tūī (Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae) is a boisterous medium-sized bird native to New Zealand. It is blue, green, and bronze colored with a distinctive white throat tuft. It is an endemic passerine bird of New Zealand, and the only species in the genus Prosthemadera. It is one of the largest species in the diverse Australasian honeyeater family Meliphagidae, and one of two living species of that family found in New Zealand, the other being the New Zealand bellbird (Anthornis melanura). The tūī has a wide distribution in the archipelago, ranging from the subtropical Kermadec Islands to the sub-Antarctic Auckland Islands, as well as the main islands.
The tūī was first encountered by Europeans in 1770 at Queen Charlotte Sound on the north coast of New Zealand's South Island during Captain James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific Ocean. Specimens were brought back to England and an engraving of a tūī by the English naturalist Peter Brown, which he called "The New Zeland creeper", was published in 1776. The tūī was seen on all three of Cook's voyages. Cook's account of his second voyage to the Pacific was published in 1777 and included a description and an illustration of the tūī. He used the names "poly-bird" and "poe-bird". He praised the bird: "The flesh is most delicious, and was the greatest luxury the woods afforded us." In 1782 the English ornithologist John Latham included the tūī as the "poë bee-eater" in his book A General Synopsis of Birds. Latham described a specimen in the Leverian Museum in London. No author had introduced a scientific name, but when in 1788 the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin revised and expanded Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae, he included the tūī with a short description, coined the binomial name Merops novaeseelandiae and cited the publications by Brown, Cook and Latham. The tūī is now the only species placed in the genus Prosthemadera that was introduced in 1840 by the English zoologist George Gray. The genus name combines the Ancient Greek prosthema meaning "appendage" with dera meaning "neck".
Cette page est générée automatiquement et peut contenir des informations qui ne sont pas correctes, complètes, à jour ou pertinentes par rapport à votre recherche. Il en va de même pour toutes les autres pages de ce site. Veillez à vérifier les informations auprès des sources officielles de l'EPFL.
Taxobox taxons | 90 genres (Voir texte)& 389 espèces (Voir listes aux articlesdes différentes familles) Les Psittaciformes sont un ordre d’oiseaux tropicaux connus, par exemple, sous les termes génériques de perroquets, perruches, cacatoès, loris ou conures, ces termes désignant également plus particulièrement certaines espèces. Ils possèdent des caractères très marqués et assez homogènes qui permettent de les identifier facilement.