Passerida Photo Albums I
The first of two album pages provide links to galleries that display images of Passerida placed in Passeriformes, see Taxonomy note below. I photographed these birds in various natural habitats. In each photo album, one or more galleries feature portraits of individual species that may include male, female, juvenile or immature birds. For some species, supplementary galleries display behaviours such as hunting, nesting, feeding, and mating.
Basal Passerida and Paroidea
Australasian Robins (Basal Passerida) and Northern Hemisphere Tits (Paroidea) are little birds that come in many colours and occupy forest and woodland habitat.
Sylvioidea
Cisticolas, grassbirds, reed-warblers and larks families feature in the album. These are small birds found in a variety of habitats including woods and wetlands.
Featured families include swallows, martins, and leaf-warblers. These are small to medium-sized birds found a wide range of habitat.
The babbler, white-eye and laughingthrush families are small to medium-sized birds. Habitat includes woods, scrub and sometimes cultivated areas.
Muscicapoidea and Allies
These three families are small to medium-sized birds. Thrushes and starlings have a wide range of habitat while mockingbirds prefer open scrubby areas in arid areas.
Flycatchers and chats are mainly arboreal Passeri that forage amongst trees and bushes. Nuthatches occupy forest and wooded areas while wrens live in most terrestrial habitats.
Passerida Taxonomy
To help the presentation of my Passeriformes photo album collections, I adopt the high-level Passerida taxonomy given in J Boyd’s Taxonomy in Flux Checklist. This approach involves moving some families to the basal/core groups and others to new and extant superfamilies.
The figure shows a simplified taxonomy family tree relevant to the Passerida photo albums. As shown in the family tree Corvida is the sister group of Passerida.
The first Passerida photo album contains Basal Passerida that comprises several groups that branch off Passeri before the Passerida together with the following core superfamilies:
(a) Paroidea,
(b) Sylvioidea, includes families moved from Passeroidea together with many existing families from the Sibley and Monroe checklist,
(c) Muscicapoidea and Allies (such as Certhioidea).
Note that Sibley and Ahlquist Taxonomy divides Passerida into three superfamilies: Sylvioidea, Muscicapoidea, and Passeroidea.
