Superb Fairywren - Taxonomy

Taxonomy

The Superb Fairywren is one of 12 species of the genus Malurus, commonly known as fairywrens, found in Australia and lowland New Guinea. Within the genus, the Superb Fairywren's closest relative is the Splendid Fairywren; these two "Blue wrens" are also related to the Purple-crowned Fairywren of northwestern Australia.

William Anderson, surgeon and naturalist on Captain James Cook's third voyage, collected the first Superb Fairywren specimen in 1777 while traveling off the coast of eastern Tasmania, in Bruny Island's Adventure Bay. He named it Motacilla cyanea because its tail reminded him of the European Wagtails of the genus Motacilla. Anderson did not live to publish his findings, although his assistant William Ellis described the bird in 1782. The genus Malurus was later described by Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot in 1816, giving the bird its current scientific name.

Shortly after the First Fleet's arrival at Port Jackson, Sydney, the bird gained the common name Superb Warbler. In the 1920s came common names Wren and Wren-warbler—both from its similarity to the European Wren—and Fairywren. The bird has also been called Mormon Wren, a reference to observations of one blue-plumaged bird accompanied by many brown-plumaged birds, which were incorrectly assumed to be all female. The Ngarrindjeri people of the Murray River and Coorong regions called it Waatji pulyeri, meaning "little one of the waatji (lignum) bush", and the Gunai called it Deeydgun, meaning "little bird with long tail". Both it and the Variegated Fairywren were known as muruduwin the local Eora and Darug inhabitants of the Sydney basin.

Like other fairywrens, the Superb Fairywren is unrelated to the true wren. It was previously classified as a member of the old world flycatcher family Muscicapidae and later as a member of the warbler family Sylviidae before being placed in the newly recognised Maluridae in 1975. More recently, DNA analysis has shown the Maluridae family to be related to the Meliphagidae (honeyeaters), and the Pardalotidae (pardalotes, scrubwrens, thornbills, gerygones and allies) in the large superfamily Meliphagoidea.