Bay Thrush
| Raiatea starling | |
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| Watercolour painting by Georg Forster, 1774 | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Aves |
| Order: | Passeriformes |
| Family: | ?Sturnidae |
| Genus: | ?Aplonis |
| Species: | Aplonis ulietensis |
| Binomial name | |
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Aplonis ulietensis (Gmelin, 1789) |
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| Synonyms | |
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The Raiatea starling, also known as the bay thrush, bay starling, or the mysterious bird of Ulieta, is an extinct bird species of uncertain taxonomic relationships that once lived on the island of Raiatea (formerly known as Ulietea, hence the specific epithet ulietensis), the second largest of the Society Islands in French Polynesia.
The species is known only from a 1774 watercolour painting of the lost type specimen, contemporary descriptions, and a few brief field notes. The artist was Georg Forster, who accompanied his father Johann Reinhold Forster as naturalists on James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific in HMS Resolution, which visited Raiatea in May and June 1774. The painting, now held by the British Natural History Museum, is annotated "Raiatea, female, June 1, 1774", and depicts the specimen obtained by the Forsters which entered the collection of Sir Joseph Banks and later disappeared. The specimen was also described as the "bay thrush" by John Latham, who had seen it in Banks' collection, in his General Synopsis of Birds (1781–1785). However, because Latham only used English names, it was left to Johann Friedrich Gmelin to give it a scientific name in 1789.
Raiatea was visited in 1850 by explorer and natural history collector Andrew Garrett, who failed to record the species. Evidently it became extinct between 1774 and 1850, almost certainly as a consequence of the inadvertent introduction of black or brown rats to the island.
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Wikipedia