Sentinel lark
Species of bird
The sentinel lark (Corypha athi) is a species of lark in the family Alaudidae found in Kenya and Tanzania. It was formerly treated as a subspecies of the rufous-naped lark.
01Taxonomy
The sentinel lark was formally described in 1900 by the German ornithologist Ernst Hartert based on a specimen collected on the plains of the Athi River in Kenya. He considered it to be a subspecies of the rufous-naped lark and coined the trinomial name Mirafra africana athi. The sentinel lark is now treated as a separate species and placed in the genus Corypha. This placement is based on the results of two molecular phylogenetic studies by a team of ornithologists led by Per Alström that were published in 2023 and 2024.
Two subspecies are recognised:
- C. a. athi (Hartert, EJO, 1900), central Kenya to northeast Tanzania
- C. a. harterti (Neumann, 1908), central south Kenya
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Sentinel lark”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Bird - 8608 (11424279316), crop.jpg by Donald Macauley from Carshalton, Surrey, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0
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