It looks genuine to me, just a wrong choice of species for the text. I thought I remembered that bird and consulted my books. It looks a lot like the Emperor Fairy-wren Malurus cyanocephalus from PNG. At least is seems entirely consistent with the R Weatherly painting (page 59) in Richard Schodde’s The Fairy-Wrens book. The only difference is in the photo, the black face mask is slightly smaller than in that painting, otherwise an exact match. Why they would choose such an obscure species, when they could easily choose what they say it is a mystery. Note they spell Sydney wrong.
So quite some interpretive license calling it our bird.
Philip
Comments
3 responses to “identified bird – information, I hope”
I would say it’s definitely a Masked Gnatcatcher – other photos on the internet are convincing. I note too that many images have a blueness to them. It seems possible to me that somebody merely jacked up the saturation to make the photo prettier, and then it was later misidentified. There are many copies of the image on the internet, so I assume the company using the image in the first linking to it was just copying it from somewhere else.
Jeremy
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Agree with John,
There are excellent photographs of Emperor Fairy-wren in Brian Coates. The Birds of Papua New Guinea Vol II.
Nikolas’ identification spot on I reckon: most lilely “M. photoshopiensis”
Graeme Stevens
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Hi Phil, Not that I would be anywhere near an expert on Emperor Fairy-wrens, but there seems to be numerous problems with that as an ID, crown is noticeably darker than throat in this bird, opposite shown in the few Emperor FW photos on the net (crown paler), black mask nowhere near as extensive (as you point out), overall blue colour of this bird is much paler, no black patch on the lower back…….. Don’t think it’s an Emperor Cheers,John
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