We (Per Alström, a leading avian taxonomist, Per Undeland an avid bird watcher and myself) were in Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh in December 2015. Per observed a Black-hooded Oriole at Mukki Forest Guest House.
Call of Black-hooded Oriole at Mukki Forest Guest House.
I straight away went out for recording, but I did not see the bird. The call was typically like that of a Rufous Treepie that I used to hear in northern India. When I saw see the bird and it was the Black-hooded Oriole Per had spotted. It was not the typical call of Black-hooded Oriole in Northern and Eastern India. On checking the literature, I found it had been described as a different subspecies, Oriolus xanthornus maderaspatanus that occurs in Gangetic plains and Peninsular India and not the nominate subspecies occurring elsewhere in India with a range going as far as Indonesia. In all there are five recognized subspecies of Black-hooded Oriole, among the others: reubeni occurs in Andamans, ceylonensis in Sri Lanka and tanakae in Northeastern Borneo.
I checked many recordings available at Xeno-canto and on Macaulay Library archives and did not find the nominate subspecies calls in the region where maderaspatanus is found or maderaspatanuscalls where the nominate subspecies, xanthornus is found. This made ask if the birds recognize each other. I played the calls of maderaspatanus to xanthornus and found no response, whereas there was strong response to calls of its own subspecies. This generally happens in taxa which have diverged to species levels, which means that we could have two species of orioles with black hood. This complements the finding of Jønsson et al. (2019) who used genetics to show that these subspecies are long diverged from each other. It seems they should be different species, Oriolus xanthornus and Oriolus maderaspatanus.
Call at Bondla Zoo Area, Goa
Call at Wildlife Institute Dehradun, Uttarakhand
Call at Chintapalli-Godum-Lammasingi Eastern Ghats, Andhra Pradesh
JønssonKA, Blom MPK, Marki PZ, Joseph L, Sangster G, Ericson PGP, and Irestedt M (2019), Complete subspecies-level phylogeny of the Oriolidae (Aves: Passeriformes): Out of Australasia and return, Mol. Phylogenet. Evol. 137, 200-209
Credit: Xeno-canto.org for using sound recordings from outside India and Mr. Vaibhv Mahesh Gupta and mr. Vivek Sarkar for allowing me to use their beautiful pictures
Black-hooded Oriole, Balasore, Odisha Photo Credit: Vivek Sarkar