In 1760 the French zoologist
Mathurin Jacques Brisson included a description of the olive thrush in his
Ornithologie based on a specimen collected from the
Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. He used the French name
Le merle olive du Cap de Bonne Espérance and the Latin
Merula Olivacea Capitis Bonae Spei. Although Brisson coined Latin names, these do not conform to the
binomial system and are not recognised by the
International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. When in 1766 the Swedish naturalist
Carl Linnaeus updated his
Systema Naturae for the
twelfth edition, he added 240 species that had been previously described by Brisson. One of these was the olive thrush. Linnaeus included a brief description, coined the
binomial name Turdus olivaceus and cited Brisson's work. Six subspecies are recognised: •
T. o. milanjensis Shelley, 1893 – south Malawi and northwest Mozambique •
T. o. swynnertoni Bannerman, 1913 – east Zimbabwe and west Mozambique •
T. o. transvaalensis (
Roberts, 1936) – northeast South Africa •
T. o. culminans Clancey, 1982 – east South Africa •
T. o. olivaceus Linnaeus, 1766 – southwest South Africa •
T. o. pondoensis Reichenow, 1917 – southeast South Africa The subspecies differ mainly in the relative amounts of white, orange and brown on the underparts. Several additional populations of African
Turdus thrushes were previously included within this group, but are now most commonly treated as separate species in their own right including the
Karoo thrush (
Turdus smithi), the
Somali thrush (
Turdus ludoviciae) and the more northerly
Abyssinian thrush, also known as the Northern olive thrush and Mountain thrush,
T. abyssinicus, itself also sometimes considered as several separate species (
Abyssinian thrush,
T. abyssinicus,
Usambara thrush,
T. roehli and
Taita thrush Turdus helleri). ==Description==