Red-winged prinia

The red-winged prinia or the red-winged warbler (Prinia erythroptera) is a bird species in the family Cisticolidae. It formerly belonged in the monotypic genus Heliolais.^[2] It is found in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, where its natural habitat is dry savanna.^[1]

Red-winged prinia
Eating grasshopper, in Gambia
Conservation status
Least Concern  (IUCN 3.1)[1]
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Passeriformes
Family:	Cisticolidae
Genus:	Prinia
Species:	P. erythroptera
Binomial name
Prinia erythroptera (Jardine, 1849)

Taxonomy

The red-winged prinia was described by the Scottish naturalist William Jardine in 1849 under the binomial name Drymoica erythroptera. The type locality is West Africa.^[3][4] The specific epithet erythroptera comes from the Ancient Greek eruthros for "red" and -pteros, "-winged".^[5]

There are four subspecies:^[2]

• P. e. erythroptera (Jardine, 1849) – Senegal to northern Cameroon
• P. e. jodoptera (Heuglin, 1864) – central Cameroon to southern Sudan and northwestern Uganda
• P. e. major (Blundell & Lovat, 1899) – Ethiopia
• P. e. rhodoptera (Shelley, 1880) – Kenya to eastern Zimbabwe and Mozambique

Most taxonomists place this species in the genus Prinia rather than in its own monotypic genus Heliolais.^[6][7] Support for this alternative placement is provided by a molecular phylogenetic study of the Cisticolidae published in 2013 that found that the red-winged warbler was closely related to the prinias.^[8]