Of all my horrible photos of drongos, my Wallacean drongo photo is probably the best. It is clearly identifiable from the photo. Interestingly, when I submitted it to iNaturalist I identified it as a black drongo. Two responded that it was Wallacean. We were in Indonesia on July 11, 2023 and landed on Rinca Island, part of the Lesser Sunda Islands, to see Komodo dragons. We came to the island by boat and after getting off walked past some mangrove trees next to the water. The drongo was hidden behind some limbs and leaves which partially obscured it and made the focus off, but the shape of the head and the body color and tail are definitive.
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Wallacean drongo on Rinca Island. |
One of the fun things about it is its limited range. It is only found in a portion of Indonesia and East Timor. It has six subspecies, all limited to one or a few islands. I saw the subspecies Dicrurus densus bimaensis, known as the Bima drongo, apparently after part of the subspecies name, which is found on the islands of Flores, Rinca, Komodo, Pantar, Alor, Gunungapi, Solor, Adonara, Lembata and Sumbawa.
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The name Wallacea comes from a geographical designation for a group of islands separated by deep-water straits from the Asian and Australian continental shelves. Wallacea includes Sulawesi, the largest island in the group, as well as Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, Sumba, Timor, Halmahera, Butru, Seram and many smaller islands. Alfred Russel Wallace was a Welsch naturalist who recorded the differences between mammal and bird fauna between the islands on either side of the continental shelves. The island of Bali is the island just left of the first shaded island to the left. This range map of the Wallacean drongo is from Birds of the World. |
It is found in subtropical and tropical moist lowland forests, mangrove forests and moist montane forests. The general coloration is dull blue-black with a greenish gloss, except the mantle which is entirely dull. It has feathers at the base of the bill which extend forward, a long and deeply forked tail and a thick, heavy bill which is highly arched and ends in a downward curve.
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Illustration of Bima subspecies of Wallacean drongo from Birds of the World. The colors in the illustration do not do justice to the coloration differentials in photographs. |