Mohoua à tête jaune

The yellowhead or mohua (Mohoua ochrocephala) is a small insectivorous passerine bird endemic to the South Island of New Zealand. Once a common forest bird, its numbers declined drastically after the introduction of rats and stoats, and it is now near threatened. The yellowhead 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 ochrocephala. The specific epithet is derived from the Ancient Greek ōkhros meaning "pale yellow" and -kephalos meaning "-headed". Gmelin based his account on the "yellow-headed fly-catcher" 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 watercolour painting of the bird by Georg Forster who had accompanied James Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific Ocean. The inscription on the painting includes the year 1774 and the location "Queen Charlotte's Sound". Queen Charlotte Sound is on the north coast of the South Island of New Zealand. This picture is the holotype for the species and is in the collection of the Natural History Museum in London. The yellowhead in now one of three species placed in the genus Mohoua that was introduced in 1837 by the French naturalist René Lesson. The species is monotypic: no subspecies are recognised. The yellowhead was known in the 19th century as the "bush canary", after its trilling song. It is also known as mohua from the Māori mōhoua. Recent classification places this species and its close relative, the whitehead, in the family Mohouidae. The yellowhead and the whitehead have allopatric distributions as, conversely, the latter is found only in the North Island and several small islands surrounding it.