Baudin's black cockatoo

Taxonomy and naming

Baudin's black cockatoo was depicted in 1832 by the English artist Edward Lear in his Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots from a specimen owned by the naturalist Benjamin Leadbeater. Lear used the common name "Baudin's cockatoo" and coined the binomial name Calyptorhynchus baudinii. The common name and specific epithet commemorate the French explorer Nicolas Baudin, who led an expedition to Australia in 1801-1804. The species is now placed in the genus Zanda that was introduced in 1913 by the Australian born ornithologist Gregory Mathews.

Carnaby's black cockatoo (Zanda latirostris) and Baudin's black cockatoo were previously classified as the same species. Common names include Baudin's black cockatoo or long-billed black cockatoo.

The two Western Australian white-tailed black cockatoo species, the short-billed Carnaby's black cockatoo and this long-billed Baudin's black cockatoo, together with the yellow-tailed black cockatoo Zanda funerea of eastern Australia are allied in the genus Zanda. Previously this genus was considered a subgenus of Calyptorhynchus, with the red-tailed black cockatoo and glossy black cockatoos forming another subgenus, Calyptorhynchus, but due to a deep genetic divergence between the two groups they are now widely treated as separate genera. The two genera differ in tail colour, head pattern, juvenile food begging calls and the degree of sexual dimorphism. Males and females of Calyptorhynchus sensu stricto have markedly different plumage, whereas those of Zanda have similar plumage.

The three species of the genus Zanda have been variously considered as two, then as a single species for many years. In a 1979 paper, Australian ornithologist Denis Saunders highlighted the similarity between the short-billed and the southern race xanthanotus of the yellow-tailed and treated them as a single species with the long-billed as a distinct species. He proposed that Western Australia had been colonised on two separate occasions, once by a common ancestor of all three forms (which became the long-billed black cockatoo), and later by what has become the short-billed black cockatoo. However, an analysis of protein allozymes published in 1984 revealed the two Western Australian forms to be more closely related to each other than to the yellow-tailed, and the consensus since then has been to treat them as three separate species.