Abstract:Ornithophily in the Chinese flora was reviewed. Literatures concerning floral visiting birds and ornithophilous (including potential) plant genera were evaluated; areal types and floral traits of the plant genera with confirmed ornithophily in China or elsewhere were also analyzed. Almost all the flower-visiting birds in China are Passeriformes. Ornithophily was found in more than 30 angiosperm families in China, which has been largely ignored. The floral characters of the ornithophilous plants in China were mostly generalized to adapt to non-nectarivorous birds. Although most of the ornithophilous genera are tropical components of the Chinese flora, there are several temperate elements of which the diversity centres are in China, such as the genus Rhododendron. Combined with phylogenetic reconstruction of the plant groups, and studies on ornithophily in these taxa, it is possible to elucidate the emergence and evolution of the bird-flower coevolution in the Old World.
