Mangrove Pitta

The mangrove pitta is a colourful passerine 180–210 mm long with a black head and buff or brown crown, a white throat or chin, greenish upperparts and shoulders, buff underparts and a reddish vent. Juveniles are similarly patterned but duller. It resembles the blue-winged pitta but has a much heavier bill, and belongs to a superspecies with the Indian pitta, the fairy pitta and the blue-winged pitta, with no recognised subspecies (Wikipedia, general species account).

It is native to the eastern Indian subcontinent and western Southeast Asia, from India to Malaysia and Indonesia, in mangrove and nipa palm forests, where it feeds on crustaceans, molluscs and insects. Its call, wieuw-wieuw, more slurred than the blue-winged pitta's, is sung from a high perch on a mangrove tree (Wikipedia, general species account).