Long-tailed Parakeet

The long-tailed parakeet (Psittacula longicauda) or Burung Bayan Nuri in Malay is a parakeet endemic to the regions of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Sumatra, Borneo and Peninsular Malaysia (including Singapore). It is allopatric with the congener, the Red-breasted parakeet, Psittacula alexandri, except in the Andaman Islands where they occur together. == Taxonomy == The long-tailed parakeet was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Psittacus longicauda in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The type locality is Malacca on the southern region of the Malay Peninsula. The long-tailed parakeet is now placed in the genus Psittacula that was introduced by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier in 1800. The name of the genus is a diminutive of the Latin word psittacus for a "parrot". The specific epithet longicauda combines the Latin longus meaning "long" and…