Davison's leaf warbler (Phylloscopus intensior) or the white-tailed leaf warbler, is a species of leaf warbler (familyPhylloscopidae). It was formerly included in the "Old World warbler" assemblage.
A species from Mount Mulayit called the Tenasserim white-tailed willow warbler (Acanthopneuste davisoni) named after the collector William Ruxton Davison was described by Eugene Oates in 1889.[2] To this species was added a few more subspecies, including disturbans, ogilviegranti, and klossi. Another subspecies was described by the American ornithologist Herbert Girton Deignan in 1956 and given the trinomial namePhylloscopus davisoni intensior.[3] The taxa disturbans, ogilviegranti and klossi were found to form a clade that is sister to P. hainanus. Since ogilviegranti was the first described of the three members of the clade it was elevated to a species and the two others made into subspecies since the sequence differences were small.[4] A study of the mitochondrial DNA sequences and calls suggested that davisoni in the strict sense was a sister of Seicercus xanthoschistos.[5][6] This left the form intensior which was unrelated and was then elevated as a full species and a second subspecies was added to it, P. i. muleyitensis (Dickinson & Christidis, 2014).[7]
^Martens, Jochen (2010). "A preliminary review of the leaf warbler genera Phylloscopus and Seicercus. Systematic notes on Asian birds 72". Brit. Orn. Club. Occas. Publs. 5: 41–116.