Yellow bittern

The yellow bittern (Botaurus sinensis) is a small bittern of Old World origins that breeds in the northern Indian subcontinent, east to the Russian Far East, Japan, and Indonesia. It is mainly a resident bird, but some northern birds migrate short distances. It has been recorded as a vagrant in Alaska. The yellow bittern was formally described in 1789 by Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Systema Naturae. He placed it with the herons, cranes, storks, and bitterns in the genus Ardea and coined the binomial name Ardea sinensis. Gmelin based his description on the "Chinese heron" that had been included by the English ornithologist John Latham in his multi-volume work A General Synopsis of Birds. Latham based his description on a collection of Chinese drawings. The yellow bittern was formerly placed in the genus Ixobrychus. A molecular phylogenetic study of the heron family Ardeidae published in 2023 found that Ixobrychus was paraphyletic, and to create monophyletic genera, Ixobrychus was merged into the genus Botaurus that had been introduced in 1819 by the English naturalist James Francis Stephens. The genus name Botaurus is Medieval Latin for a bittern.