The Hispaniolan euphonia (Chlorophonia musica) is a species of bird in the family Fringillidae, the finches and euphonias. It is endemic to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola that is shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
Taxonomy and systematics
The Hispaniolan euphonia has a complicated taxonomic history. It was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with the manakins in the genus Pipra and coined the binomial Pipra musica. The specific epithet is from Latin musicus meaning "musical" or "musician". Gmelin based his account on "L'organiste", a bird from Saint-Domingue, a French colony on the island of Hispaniola, that had been described in 1778 by the French polymath the Comte de Buffon in his multi-volume work, Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. A hand-colored engraving by François-Nicolas Martinet was published separately to accompany Buffon's text. The species was eventually reassigned to genus Euphonia that had been erected in 1806.
For a time the Hispaniolan euphonia, the golden-rumped euphonia (now C. cyanocephala), and the elegant euphonia (now C. elegantissima) were treated as a single species called the blue-hooded euphonia. They were separated by 1998 and formed a superspecies. Following further studies, in the early 2020s those three species were reassigned by most taxonomic systems to their present genus Chlorophonia that had been erected in 1851. The first version of AviList (2025) also places the Hispaniolan euphonia in Chlorophonia. However, as of 2025 BirdLife International's Handbook of the Birds of the World retains it in Euphonia.
Genera Euphonia and Chlorophonia were long placed in the family Thraupidae, the "true" tanagers. Multiple studies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries resulted in their being reassigned to their present place in the family Fringillidae.
