Blue-winged Leafbird Chloropsis moluccensis is split from Javan (formerly Blue-winged) Leafbird C. cochinchinensis (Clements 2007:386)

Summary: Java now has its own endemic species of leafbird, the Javan Leafbird, though it is becoming rare due to the cage-bird trade.

Details: Several of the taxa long treated as subspecies of Chloropsis cochinchinensis (Mayr and Greenway 1960c) were originally named as full species, but one with an especially complicated nomenclatural history is the nominate, much earlier and now again recognized to have been named from Java rather than Cochinchina (Wells et al. 2003). Males of nominate Chloropsis cochinchinensis differ conspicuously from other taxa still treated as conspecific (the moluccensis complex, which excludes C. jerdoni of Peninsular India and Sri Lanka and C. kinabaluensis of northeastern Borneo) in coloration of crown and wing, and were found to be more deeply diverged in mtDNA and nuclear DNA than the taxa in the moluccensis complex (Moltesen et al. 2012). Thus del Hoyo and Collar (2016) and Eaton et al. (2016), followed by Gill et al. (2021, IOC v.11.2), considered C. moluccensis a separate polytypic species from the monotypic Javan C. cochinchinensis, a position with which WGAC and Clements et al. (2023) now align.