Green Wood Hoopoe (Phoeniculus purpureus)
About the Green Wood Hoopoe
The green wood hoopoe (Phoeniculus purpureus) is a large, up to 44 cm (17 in) long tropical bird native to Africa. It is a member of the family Phoeniculidae, the wood hoopoes, and was formerly known as the red-billed wood hoopoe. In 1784 the English illustrator John Frederick Miller included a hand-coloured plate of the green wood hoopoe in his Icones animalium et plantarum. He coined the binomial name Promerops purpureus and mistakenly specified the type locality as eastern India. The green wood hoopoe is now one of five species placed in the genus Phoeniculus that was introduced in 1821 by the Polish zoologist Feliks Paweł Jarocki. Six subspecies are recognised: P. p. senegalensis (Vieillot, 1822) – south Senegal to south Ghana
A real field recording of the Green Wood Hoopoe. Press play and focus on the rhythm and pitch of each phrase.
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Our streaming copies are mirrored from the original xeno-canto file and transcoded to 96 kbps mono — a modification, so we note it here; the licence for each recording is named in its credit below.
1 recording on this page · licensed CC BY-SA ×1 · mirrored on this server, free for commercial reuse · recorded in Botswana, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and elsewhere · xeno-canto lists 160 recordings for this species in total.
Similar species
- Black-billed Wood HoopoePhoeniculus somaliensisprofile
- Forest Wood HoopoePhoeniculus castaneicepsprofile
- Grant's Wood HoopoePhoeniculus grantiprofile
- Violet Wood HoopoePhoeniculus damarensisprofile
- White-headed Wood HoopoePhoeniculus bolleiprofile
Species grouped by shared genus, family and range.