The Guinea turaco (Tauraco persa), also known as the green turaco or green lourie, is a species of turaco, a group of African otidimorph birds. It formerly included the Livingstone's, Schalow's, Knysna, black-billed and Fischer's turacos as subspecies.
Taxonomy
The Guinea turaco was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. He placed it together with the cuckoos in the genus Cuculus and coined the binomial name Cuculus persa. The specific epithet is Latin meaning "Persian". Linnaeus based his description on the "Touraco" that had been described and illustrated in 1743 by the English naturalist George Edwards in his A Natural History of Uncommon Birds. Edwards's specimen had been brought to London from Guinea in West Africa. The Guinea turaco is now placed in the genus Tauraco that was introduced in 1779 by the Polish naturalist Jan Krzysztof Kluk.
Three subspecies are recognised: It can be found in forests of West and Central Africa, ranging from Senegal east to DR Congo and south to northern Angola. It is present in the Republic of the Congo, Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.
This species inhabits subtropical and tropical moist lowland, gallery forests