Red-winged prinia | |
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Eating grasshopper, in Gambia | |
Scientific classification | |
Domain: | Eukaryota |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Class: | Aves |
Order: | Passeriformes |
Family: | Cisticolidae |
Genus: | Prinia |
Species: | P. erythroptera
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Binomial name | |
Prinia erythroptera (Jardine, 1849)
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The red-winged prinia or the red-winged warbler (Prinia erythroptera) is a bird species in the family Cisticolidae. It formerly belonged in the monotypic genus Heliolais.[2] It is found in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, where its natural habitat is dry savanna.[1]
The red-winged prinia was described by the Scottish naturalist William Jardine in 1849 under the binomial name Drymoica erythroptera. The type locality is West Africa.[3][4] The specific epithet erythroptera comes from the Ancient Greek eruthros for "red" and -pteros, "-winged".[5]
There are four subspecies:[2]
Most taxonomists place this species in the genus Prinia rather than in its own monotypic genus Heliolais.[6][7] Support for this alternative placement is provided by a molecular phylogenetic study of the Cisticolidae published in 2013 that found that the red-winged warbler was closely related to the prinias.[8]