Yellow-billed Blue Magpie

The yellow-billed blue magpie, or gold-billed magpie, is a 66 cm crow-family bird including a tail of about 46 cm. It forms a superspecies with the Taiwan blue magpie and the red-billed blue magpie. The western form, cucullata, is found from the western end of the range to western Nepal and is common through most of the hill stations of the western Himalaya, breeding at 1,500–3,000 m; the eastern form, from eastern Nepal eastwards, has darker lilac-tinged underparts and seldom occurs below about 1,830 m (Wikipedia, general species account).

It is found throughout the Himalaya from Hazara to the Brahmaputra, with a disjunct population in Vietnam. It is primarily arboreal but often feeds on the ground, hopping with the tail held high, and eats small mammals, the eggs and young of other birds, insects and wild fruits and berries. SoIB 2023 treats it as a Himalayan endemic and rates it a Low conservation priority, a resident and altitudinal migrant with a Moderate range of about 113,000 km² and an increase of about 88% over the long term (Wikipedia, general species account; SoIB 2023).