Blue-eared Barbet Psilopogon cyanotis is split fromBlack-eared (formerly Blue-eared) Barbet P. duvaucelii (Clements 2007:239)

Summary: The black-eared forms of Malaysia to Borneo long treated within Blue-eared Barbet are now treated as a separate species, the Black-eared Barbet. True Blue-eared Barbets are now restricted to southern and southeast Asia north of Malaysia.

Details: Blyth (1847) described Psilopogon cyanotis of southeast Asia based on its conspicuously different facial coloration from the Malaysian forms P. duvaucelii, but these have long been treated as conspecific (e.g., Peters 1945 and subsequent authors). The position taken by del Hoyo and Collar (2014) that P. cyanotis should be treated as a distinct species is supported by a seemingly narrow hybrid zone between the cyanotis and duvaucelii subspecies groups in southernmost Thailand based on ML images, and WGAC follows this treatment as separate species. The two groups are very similar if not identical vocally, as is the previously split allopatric P. australis of Java and Bali, which differs even more in facial coloration and is deeply diverged on mtDNA from P. duvaucelii (den Tex and Leonard 2013).

English names: The English name Black-eared Barbet for P. duvaucelii is apt and aligns with that of HBW and BirdLife International (2022); Blue-eared Barbet is now restricted to the most widely distributed daughter species, and the only one with blue ear-coverts.