Black nunbird
The black nunbird is a species of bird in the family Bucconidae, the puffbirds.
It is found in north-central South America in the Guianas of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana including the Guiana Shield; also eastern and southeastern Venezuela in the eastern Orinoco River Basin, and the Amazon Basin of northeast Brazil in the north-central and northeast. It is not found south of the Amazon River, and its western limit bordering southeast Venezuela is the Rio Negro.
Its natural habitat is subtropical and tropical moist lowland forests.Taxonomy
The black nunbird was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected in Cayenne, French Guiana. 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 Calculus ater in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The black nunbird is now placed in the genus Monasa that was introduced by the French ornithologist Louis Vieillot in 1816. The species in monotypic.. The generic name is from the Ancient Greek monas meaning "solitary". The specific epithet atra is from the Latin ater meaning "black".
