Old World flycatcher
The Old World flycatchers are a large family, the Muscicapidae, of small passerine birds mostly[clarification needed] restricted to the Old World (Europe, Africa and Asia). These are mainly small arboreal insectivores, many of which, as the name implies, take their prey on the wing. The family includes 324 species and is divided into 51 genera.[1]
The name Muscicapa for the family was introduced by the Scottish naturalist John Fleming in 1822.[2][3] The word had earlier been used for the genus Muscicapa by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760.[4] Muscicapa comes from the Latin musca meaning a fly and capere to catch.[5][6]
In 1910 the German ornithologist Ernst Hartert found it impossible to define boundaries between the three families Muscicapidae, Sylviidae (Old World warblers) and Turdidae (thrushes). He therefore treated them as subfamilies of an extended flycatcher family that also included Timaliidae (Old World babblers) and Monarchidae (Monarch flycatchers).[7][8] Forty years later a similar arrangement was adopted by the American ornithologists Ernst Mayr and Dean Amadon in an article published in 1951. Their large family Muscicapidae which they termed the "primitive insect eaters" contained 1460 species divided into eight subfamilies.[9] The use of the extended group was endorsed by a committee set up following the Eleventh International Ornithological Congress held in Basel in 1954.[10] Subsequent DNA–DNA hybridization studies by Charles Sibley and others showed that the subfamilies were not closely related to one another. As a result, the large group was broken up into a number of separate families,[11] although for a while most authorities continued to retain the thrushes in Muscicapidae.[12][13] In 1998 the American Ornithologists' Union chose to treat the thrushes as a separate family in the seventh edition of their Check-list of North American birds and subsequently most authors have followed their example.[1][14]
The appearance of these birds is very varied, but they mostly have weak songs and harsh calls. They are small to medium birds, ranging from 9 to 22 cm in length.[15] Many species are dull brown in colour, but the plumage of some can be much brighter, especially in the males.[16] Most have broad, flattened bills suited to catching insects in flight, although the few ground-foraging species typically have finer bills.[17]
Old World flycatchers live in almost every environment with a suitable supply of trees, from dense forest to open scrub, and even the montane woodland of the Himalayas. The more northerly species migrate south in winter, ensuring a continuous diet of insects.[17]
Depending on the species, their nests are either well-constructed cups placed in a tree or cliff ledge, or simply lining in a pre-existing tree hole. The hole-nesting species tend to lay larger clutches, with an average of eight eggs, rather than just two to five.[17]
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