Solomons Brush Cuckoo

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Diagnosis: main song of one type or blended with a second ‘ where’s the tea’ vocalization, elements of the main song long and flattened, resembling those of blandus from the Admiralty Islands, but still longer and slower paced (Fig. 2); basic morph of Solomons morphotype (see 3.2.2. (5) above); body medium-sized and tail proportionally long: wing c. 113 – 123 mm, tail / wing ratio 1.09 – 1.15 (Table 2); barred females with dorsa dully barred black on dark cinnamon, and ventral white heavily barred black and pervasively washed cinnamon; juveniles dark in tone and coarsely mottled and barred black on tawny-cinnamon, extending to very broad rufous barring in outer rectrices. Element length, slow song pace and chimeric character of the main song, where main song and ‘ brain-fever’ call run into each other, are unique and render the Solomon population bioacoustically distinct. So does the pervasive rufous wash over the ventrum in barred-morph females and over dorsum and through outer rectrices in juveniles. Except for Rothschild & Hartert (1901), C. addendus has, until now, been treated as a subspecies of variolosus by all reviewers since Hartert (1925).