Currawong

Currawongs are not as terrestrial as the Australian magpie and have shorter legs. They are omnivorous, foraging in foliage, on tree trunks and limbs, and on the ground, taking insects and larvae (often dug out from under the bark of trees), fruit, and the nestlings of other birds.

Taxonomy and evolution

Ornithologist Richard Bowdler Sharpe held that currawongs were more closely related to crows and ravens than the Australian magpie and butcherbirds, and duly placed them in the Corvidae. A review of the family Cracticidae by ornithologist John Albert Leach in 1914, during which he had studied their musculature, found that all three genera were closely related. Ornithologists Charles Sibley and Jon Ahlquist recognised the close relationship between the woodswallows and the butcherbirds and relatives in 1985, and combined them into a Cracticini clade, which later became the family Artamidae in the official Australian checklist in 2008. The International Ornithologists' Union has maintained the two clades as separate families, hence currawongs are listed along with butcherbirds, magpie and Peltops.

The family Cracticidae has its greatest diversity in Australia, which suggests that the radiation of its insectivorous and scavenger members to occupy various niches took place there. The butcherbirds became predators of small animals, much like the northern hemisphere shrikes, while the Australian magpie became a predominantly ground-hunting omnivore, with the currawongs generally hunting in both living and fallen trees, scavenging and hunting insects and small vertebrates, and occupying in Australia the niche of many Eurasian corvids.

A 2013 genetic analysis by Anna Kearns and colleagues confirmed the currawongs are a monophyletic group, with some indication that the black currawong lineage diverged from a common ancestor of the grey and pied currawongs (though sampling was limited and not the focus of the study). The common ancestor of butcherbirds and currawongs diverged from peltops between 28.3 and 16.9 million years ago, which followed the expansion of open habitat in Australia 30 to 25 million years ago. The ancestors of currawongs then diverged from the ancestor of butcherbirds and magpie between 17.3 and 9.8 million years ago.

Currawongs and indeed all members of the broader Artamidae are part of a larger group of African shrike-like birds including bushshrikes (Malaconotidae), helmetshrikes (Prionopidae), ioras (Aegithinidae), and vangas (Vangidae), which were defined as the superfamily Malaconotoidea by Cacraft and colleagues in 2004. They are thus only distantly related to crows and ravens, which are in a separate superfamily Corvoidea.

Species and races

Although there are several distinct forms, the number of species has varied between two and seven, with three currently recognised. (In 1870 the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London had a living specimen of each of the three species.) Several subspecies of the grey currawong are fairly distinctive and described on that species page.

Etymology

The term currawong itself is derived from the call of the pied currawong. However, the exact origin of term is unclear; the most likely antecedent is the word garrawaŋ from the local Jagera language from the Brisbane region, although the Dharug word gurawaruŋ from the Sydney basin is a possibility. Yungang as well as kurrawang and kurrawah are names from the Tharawal people of the Illawarra region.