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grey currawong
The grey currawong (''Strepera versicolor'') is a large passerine bird native to southern Australia and Tasmania. One of three currawong species in the genus ''Strepera'', it is closely related to the butcherbirds and Australian magpie of the family Artamidae. It is a large crow-like bird, around long on average, with yellow irises, and a heavy bill, and dark plumage with white undertail and wing patches. The male and female are similar in appearance. Six subspecies are recognised and are distinguished by overall plumage colour, which ranges from slate-grey for the nominate from New South Wales and eastern Victoria and subspecies ''plumbea'' from Western Australia, to sooty black for the clinking currawong of Tasmania and subspecies ''halmaturina'' from Kangaroo Island. All grey currawongs have a loud distinctive ringing or clinking call.
Within its range, the grey currawong is generally sedentary, although it is a winter visitor in the southeastern corner of Australia. Comparatively little studied, much of its behaviour and habits is poorly known. Omnivorous, it has a diet that includes a variety of berries, invertebrates, and small vertebrates. Less arboreal than the pied currawong, the grey currawong spends more time foraging on the ground. It builds nests high in trees, which has limited the study of its breeding habits. Unlike its more common relative, it has adapted poorly to human impact and has declined in much of its range. The habitat includes all kinds of forested areas as well as scrubland in dryer parts of the country.
== Taxonomy and naming ==
The grey currawong was first described as ''Corvus versicolor'' by ornithologist John Latham in 1801, who gave it the common name of 'variable crow'. The specific name ''versicolor'' means 'of variable colours' in Latin.〔Higgins ''et al''., p. 564.〕 Other old common names include grey crow-shrike, leaden crow-shrike, mountain magpie, black-winged currawong (in western Victoria), clinking currawong (in Tasmania), and squeaker (in Western Australia).〔 The black-winged currawong was known to the Ramindjeri people of Encounter Bay as ''wati-eri'', the word meaning "to sneak" or "to track". ''Kiling-kildi'' was a name derived from the call used by the people of the lower Murray River.
Together with the pied currawong (''S. graculina'') and black currawong (''S. fuliginosa''), the grey currawong forms the genus ''Strepera''. Although crow-like in appearance and habits, currawongs are only distantly related to true crows, and are instead closely related to the Australian magpie and the butcherbirds. The affinities of all three genera were recognised early on and they were placed in the family Cracticidae in 1914 by ornithologist John Albert Leach after he had studied their musculature. Ornithologists Charles Sibley and Jon Ahlquist recognised the close relationship between the woodswallows and the butcherbirds and relatives in 1985, and combined them into a Cracticini clade, which later became the family Artamidae.〔
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