The south Melanesian cuckooshrike was
formally described in 1788 by the German naturalist
Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of
Carl Linnaeus's
Systema Naturae. He placed it with the crows in the
genus Corvus and coined the
binomial name Corvus caledonicus. Gmelin based his description on the "New Caledonian crow" that had been described in 1781 by the English ornithologist
John Latham in his book
A General Synopsis of Birds. The naturalist
Joseph Banks had provided Latham with a water-colour drawing of the cuckooshrike by
Georg Forster who had accompanied
James Cook on his
second voyage to the Pacific Ocean. The specimen had been collected in September 1774 in
New Caledonia. This picture is the
holotype for the species and is held by the
Natural History Museum in London. The south Melanesian cuckooshrike is now one of 22 species placed in the genus
Coracina that was introduced in 1816 by French ornithologist
Louis Pierre Vieillot. Four
subspecies are recognised. •
C. c. thilenii (
Neumann, 1915) –
Espiritu Santo,
Malo and
Malekula (central west
Vanuatu) •
C. c. seiuncta Mayr &
Ripley, 1941 –
Erromango (south
Vanuatu) •
C. c. lifuensis (
Tristram, 1879) –
Lifou Island (central
Loyalty Islands,
New Caledonia) •
C. c. caledonica (
Gmelin, JF, 1788) –
Grande Terre and
Île des Pins (
New Caledonia) ==References==