Chestnut-bellied rock thrush

The chestnut-bellied rock thrush is 21–23 cm (8.3–9.1 in) in overall length and weighs 48–61 g (1.7–2.2 oz). The male has a blue-grey crown and upperparts with darker lores and throat. The undersides are deep chestnut. The female has dull grey-brown upperparts and scalloped slate-grey with buffy-white underparts. The eyering and the post-auricular patch are whitish-buff.^[2]

Its natural habitat is temperate forests. It is an altitudanal migrant and experiences Zugunruhe strongly the night before migration.

It is native to the Himalayas, Purvanchal Range and southern China ; some birds winter to northern Indochina.

The chestnut-bellied rock thrush was formally described in 1832 by the Irish zoologist Nicholas Vigors under the binomial name Turdus erythogaster.^[3] The identical name had been used for a different species by the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert in 1783.^[4][5] The chestnut-bellied rock thrush was described again in 1833 by the English naturalists William Jardine and Prideaux John Selby under the binomial name Petrocincla rufiventris.^[6] They specified the locality as the "Himalayan region" but this was restricted to Shimla in Himachal Pradesh, India, by Sidney Dillon Ripley in 1961.^[7][8] The specific epithet rufiventris is Modern Latin meaning "red-bellied" from Latin rufus meaning "ruddy" or "rufous" and venter, ventris meaning "belly".^[9] The chestnut-bellied rock thrush is now one of the 15 species placed in the genus Monticola that was introduced in 1822 by the German naturalist Friedrich Boie.^[10] Monticola is the Latin word for mountain-dweller or mountaineer.^[11] The species is monotypic: no subspecies are recognised.^[10]