All species › Passerines › Chats, Old World flycatchers and allies › White-rumped Shama
White-rumped Shama | Copsychus malabaricus
Shamalijster | Shama culiblanco
The White-rumped Shama is a Southeast Asian flycatcher with a long, white-edged tail, released on Hawaii as a cage bird in the 1930s and 1940s. It keeps to the dense undergrowth of moist valley forest on Kauaʻi and Oʻahu, and has spread from there to several other islands.
Voice
The song is made of clear whistled phrases of three to seven notes, varying in pitch and separated by short pauses; imitated fragments of other birds are often worked in. The sound carries far through closed forest and is usually the first sign of the bird. In alarm it gives a hard rattling chek and a thin rising whistle. Ludwig Koch used a White-rumped Shama in 1889 for the earliest known recording of a bird's voice.
No recording with a suitable Creative Commons licence has been found for this species yet; what to listen for is described below.
Identification
A slender bird with a long, graduated tail that is often held raised. The male is glossy black on head, breast and upperparts, with a chestnut belly, a white rump and white outer tail feathers; the tail can make up nearly half the total length. The female is grey-brown where the male is black, with a duller belly and a shorter tail. Both sexes have a black bill and pink feet. Young birds resemble the female, with spotting on the breast.
Confusion species
On Hawaii it is hardly confusable: no other forest bird combines that tail length with white on rump and tail sides. Common Myna has a shorter tail, is grey-brown and shows white wing patches and a yellow eye-patch. Northern Cardinal and Red-billed Leiothrix live partly in the same scrub but are compact and short-tailed. Anyone going by song alone can be led astray by the imitations; then note the clear whistled base tone and the fixed phrase structure.
Habitat
In its native range, dense undergrowth of broadleaf and bamboo forest in the lowlands. On Hawaii, moist valley forest and wooded ridges up to middle elevations, with a thick shrub layer of introduced plants; also gardens and park woodland at the edge of settlement, especially after breeding. The bird stays low, feeding on the ground and in the leaf litter on insects, and rarely comes into the open.
Where the bird is most often found, arranged by the USNVC — the vegetation classification of the United States and Canada — and CMECS for sea and coast.
Range and movements
Native to the Indian subcontinent, Nepal, southern China, Indochina, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo and neighbouring islands. On Kauaʻi a few birds of the Himalayan form were released around 1931; on Oʻahu some 84 birds were released by the Hui Manu Society in the late 1930s and the 1940s. From there the species reached Niʻihau, Molokaʻi and Lanaʻi unaided, and Maui since 2015. On Kauaʻi numbers peaked in the late 1970s and then fell, while in the highlands of the Alakai Plateau the species increased sharply between 2000 and 2012. Outside Hawaii it is also established on Taiwan.
- Resident
Where and when to look
Look for it on Oʻahu in the valleys behind Honolulu or on Kauaʻi along the forest trails in the north, early in the morning from March to August, when song is at its height. Stand still at the sound and scan low in the undergrowth: the white rump flashes as the bird hops from branch to branch, while the rest of the plumage disappears into the shade.
Conservation
The species is listed as Least Concern (LC). In its native range it is numerous, but it is trapped on a large scale for the songbird trade, which has locally emptied forests in Indonesia. On Hawaii it counts as an introduced species without protected status; there it eats native invertebrates, spreads the seeds of invasive plants and may compete with native forest birds, which is why islands it has only recently reached are monitored. On Taiwan it is treated as invasive.
Scientific name
Copsychus malabaricus | (Scopoli, 1786)
Giovanni Antonio Scopoli described the species in 1786 as Muscicapa malabarica, from a specimen taken at Mahé on the Malabar Coast by Pierre Sonnerat; because it was later moved to another genus, author and year stand in parentheses. Copsychus goes back to Greek kopsukhos, 'blackbird'; malabaricus means 'of Malabar'. The name shama comes from Hindi, where it denotes the bird in general.