About Pycnonotus aurigaster (Vieillot, 1818)
The sooty-headed bulbul, with the scientific name Pycnonotus aurigaster (Vieillot, 1818), is a medium-sized songbird that reaches 18 to 21 centimetres in length and has a short crest. It can be told apart from the similar red-vented bulbul by its tan front, a smaller area of black on its head, and a gold-colored vent in some subspecies. Its call consists of a series of whistled notes, with a similar tone to the call of the red-whiskered bulbul, but it is given more quickly. This bulbul is distributed across Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, southern China, Hong Kong, Macao, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Within China, the species is mostly restricted to the southern part of the country, which matches the range of the palaeotropical ecoregion, though it has been recorded as far north as Shanghai in eastern China and Chengdu in western China. The species has a disjunct distribution, split into two separate subpopulations by the Malay Peninsula; it does not occur between Prachuap Khiri Khan province in northern Thailand and Kuala Lumpur in southern Malaysia. In Hong Kong, the sooty-headed bulbul is not rare, but it is noticeably less common than the red-whiskered bulbul and the light-vented bulbul. Unlike these two species, it favors dryland agricultural areas over other habitats, but it can also be found in fire-damaged and degraded hill shrubland.
