Mangrove Robin

The mangrove robin (Melanodryas pulverulenta) is a passerine bird in the Australasian robin family Petroicidae. It is found in the Aru Islands, New Guinea, and northern Australia. The bird's common name refers to its natural habitat. It lives in mangrove forests and seldom flies outside these biomes. == Taxonomy == The mangrove robin was formally described in 1850 as Myiolestes pulverulentus by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte from a specimen collected in New Guinea. The type location was restricted to the Utanata River in southern New Guinea by Ernst Mayr in 1941. The specific epithet is from Latin meaning "dusty" or "powdered". The species was subsequently moved to the genus Peneoenanthe by the Australian ornithologist Gregory Mathews in 1920. Based on the results of a 2011 molecular phylogenetic study of the Australasian robins by Les Christidis and coworkers, the mangrove robin was moved to the genus Peneothello. In 2025 the AviList checklist merged the genus Peneothello into an expanded Melanodryas. There are four subspecies. M. p. pulverulenta (Bonaparte, 1850) – coastal New Guinea M. p. leucura (Gould, 1869) – Aru Islands (south west of New Guinea), northeast coast of Australia M. p. alligator (Mathews, 1912) – coastal northern Australia…