Pink-breasted Flowerpecker Dicaeum keiense Scientific name definitions

The Pink-breasted Flowerpecker is a recently split species endemic to the southeastern Moluccas, on the Tanimbar Islands, the Kai Islands, and Watubela; it was formerly considered conspecific with the Mistletoebird (Dicaeum hirundinaceum) of mainland Australia and the Aru Islands, off western New Guinea. Two subspecies are recognized, separated largely by the pattern of the underparts in male plumage. Some doubts have permeated the literature as to how to treat those birds on the Aru Islands, with three possibilities: as a subspecies of Mistletoebird (the current status quo here), as a subspecies of the present species, or as an independent third species within the complex, under which arrangement those on the Tanimbar and Kai Islands might take the name Salvadori’s Flowerpecker, for Count Adelardo Tommaso Salvadori Paleotti (1835–1923), an early expert on the birds of this remote region. In part due to this species having long been regarded as “just another Mistletoebird” and because its populations are confined to a suite of comparatively rarely visited islands on the easternmost edge of Indonesia, the biology and natural history of this flowerpecker are still very poorly known. Even its habitat requirements are only partially understood, the species being reported mostly in open woodland, but also in the canopy of rainforest and in cultivated gardens on the Kai and Tanimbar Islands.