page_title: Brahminy kite
section_title: Taxonomy
hierarchical_section_title: Brahminy kite / Taxonomy
caption_attribution_description: বাংলা: শঙ্খ চিল, কুয়াকাটা ইকোপার্কEnglish: Brahminy kite (Haliastur indus), Kuakata Eco-Park This is a photo of a natural heritage site in Bangladesh identified by the ID: BDPA-EP-A-51-9
context_page_description: The brahminy kite, formerly known as the red-backed sea-eagle in Australia, is a medium-sized bird of prey in the family Accipitridae, which also includes many other diurnal raptors, such as eagles, buzzards, and harriers. They are found in the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and Australia. They are found mainly on the coast and in inland wetlands, where they feed on dead fish and other prey. Adults have a reddish-brown body plumage contrasting with their white head and breast which make them easy to distinguish from other birds of prey.
context_section_description: In 1760, French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson described and illustrated the Brahminy kite in the first volume of his Oiseaux based on a specimen collected in Pondicherry, India. He used the French name L'aigle de Pondichery. The brahminy kite was included by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. It was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text.  Neither Brisson nor Buffon included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Falco indus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The brahminy kite is now placed with the whistling kite in the genus Haliastur that was erected by the English naturalist Prideaux John Selby in 1840.
  Four subspecies are recognized:
  H. i. indus (Boddaert, 1783) – South Asia
  H. i. intermedius Blyth, 1865 – Malay Peninsula , Greater and Lesser Sunda Islands, Sulawesi and the Philippines
  H. i. girrenera (Vieillot, 1822) – New Guinea, Bismarck Archipelago and north Australia
  H. i. flavirostris Condon & Amadon, 1954 – Solomon Islands
caption: In flight, the rounded tail and plumage of adults is distinctive.
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