Masked Laughingthrush

The masked laughingthrush (Pterorhinus perspicillatus) is a species of laughingthrush found in China, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Macau. It is often seen in small noisy flocks of seven. Its Chinese name qī zǐ-mèi (Chinese: 七姊妹 ) means 'seven brothers and sisters'. Taxonomy The masked laughingthrush was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. (Wikipedia, general species account).

He placed it with the thrushes in the genus Turdus and coined the binomial name Turdus perspicillatus. The specific epithet perspicillatus is Modern Latin meaning "spectacled". Gmelin based his description on "Le Merle de la Chine" that had been described in 1775 by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. A hand-coloured engraving by François-Nicolas Martinet was published to accompany Buffon's text.