Colombia - Dark and Dashing

Ok, so "dark and dashing" is not exactly a colour category but these birds have either all dark plumage or dark colours contrasting with light highlights (or vice-versa), e.g. classy black and white patterns like this beautiful male Torrent Duck, at home in the fast flowing streams roaring down the Andes.


and this second image of a pair of Torrent Ducks showing the strong sexual dimorphism. The interesting thing about the male plumage is that is seems at once showy and cryptic. In the foaming water as in the first photo above or against the white and black rocks, the white and black lines blend in so well that i usually spotted the female first. At the same time though it is not hard to understand how his stylish garb highlighted by red bill and legs might equally be driven by sexual selection. I assume that she is well camouflaged when sitting on a nest in the rocks, especially with the grey and white streaking on her back barely visible in this photo.



Walking on the water, or more strictly speaking walking on floating vegetation, thanks to extremely elongated toes that spread their weight, is this Wattled Jacana. Jacanas are an interesting pantropical family, known for the polyandrous breeding system found in most, but not all, of the 8 species worldwide.


Despite their large size, the cracids (guans, chachalacas and curassows) are generally much more arboreal than pheasants, partridges and grouse as is seen in these photos of Sickle-winged Guan

and the endangered Cauca Guan.

Keen North American listers should have the Southern Lapwing on their radars. With a species name of “chilensis” you get some idea of their original range; however they have been on the move north, colonising Panama and then Costa Rica and with more and more sightings further north including the bird on the Eastern Seaboard that graced the cover of a recent ABA issue.

A truly handsome Buteo, the White-rumped Hawk is one hawk that is not hard to identify.

The Powerful Woodpecker is a congenitor of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker and this photo shows the white lines running down the back found in several woodpeckers from this genus.

Staying with black and white but moving out of the passerines, after much effort, i finally managed a shot of this tiny and restless male White-flanked Antwren peering from behind a leaf larger than himself. The insert shows a side view with the characteristic white stripe along the flank and breast side and you can also see the white spotting on the wing bend found in many species of antbird.

The white of the Thick-billed Seedfinch is mostly hidden until they open their wings (underwing is white) – no prizes for guessing what they eat with a cracking great bill like that.

Two birds that might have been included in the previous email but didn’t fit are the dashing Brown-backed Chat-tyrant, common denizen of high altitude low vegetation and a charming and friendly little companion when you walk across the páramo – they look so classy with their white supercilium and cinnamon wing bars,

and the distinctive Cinnamon Flycatcher. This individual was photographed from a window in a torrential downpour, which didn’t seem to compromise their maneuverability in the air nor stop them from catching many tasty morsels. If you look closely you can see some of the yellow feathers from the concealed crown patch.

The Hemispingus are an interesting genus of skulking tanager-like birds, the Black-capped Hemispingus being arguably among the most distinctive with their handsome crown stripes.

This Yellow-hooded Blackbird looks very similar to our Yellow-headed Blackbird but is not actually in the same genus! If you are wondering, the Yellow-hooded is quite a bit smaller and has not white in the wings.

Last but not least, two species of flowerpiercers. The White-sided Flowerpiercer on the right shows the hooked upper mandible and the Masked Flowerpiercer on the left is demonstrating how this hook is used to poke a small hole in the top of a flower to extract nectar. This technique is often called “robbing” a flower because these birds are not likely to get dusted with pollen this way and hence are not good pollinators. Personally, i suspect that their body feathers may sometimes carry pollen. As you will see in the sixth blog of this series, hummingbird sometimes use the holes that flowerpiercers make for easy feeding… but i am getting ahead of myself!

My website (http://artusophotos.com/) has some larger copies of these images...

Christian

Colombia - Brown and Rufous

Hi folks, after red, yellow, green and blue we move now to the more subtle brown and rufous. But don’t be fooled, these are some absolutely beautiful birds!

We begin with the highlight of the trip for me – a screech owl! Ok, so, i have seen screech-owls before (cough, cough) but the so-called Santa Marta Screech Owl was particularly exciting because you won’t find this owl on any taxonomic list... by that i mean that this species was only discovered recently and is still awaiting description. I am actually somewhat surprised that i managed to hold the camera steady when i saw a pair to take photos of this male. Most interesting about this owl to me were the very long wings and the large size, even larger than other high-elevation screech owls. This owl is one of the 18 or so bird species that are endemic to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a small range independent of the main Andean chain in northernmost Colombia with spectacular views of permanently snow-capped peaks and the Caribbean ocean below. A really extraordinary birding location that i would recommend to anyone, and probably one where more discoveries are yet to be made. In addition to the endemic species there are many endemic subspecies, some of which are slated for the splitting board. As it so happens, this photo was taken on my very first night in Santa Marta and it rained for long periods every other night.



That was the story almost every night for me in Colombia, as it turns out that October and November are the wettest months of the year (or so i was told). Alas, therefore, owling was extremely tough and usually involved getting up at 3am when the rain subsided and trying to find nightbirds before dawn. I got a few lifers this way like the Rufous-banded Owl whose back i photographed but who refused to turn their head, but others like the Crested Owl that i have so long dreamt of seeing were heard only (i nearly convinced myself to swim the raging torrent to get to the other side to try to find their calling location). So, there will be only one other owl in this email, a “real” Ferruginous Pygmy Owl. I say “real” because there is very convincing evidence that the taxon called Ferruginous Pygmy Owl in North and Central America should be treated as a distinct species, Ridgway’s Pygmy Owl Glaucidium ridgwayi, although the AOU hasn’t split them yet.



This Band-winged Nightjar was one of the very few nightbirds i found at dusk on a rare evening when the rain didn’t begin until after 7pm.



This Common Potoo seemed to have a fondness for a particular fence post and so, even though i didn’t get a photo at first, a little patience brought a second opportunity a few hours later. I guess you can tell that i “fixed” the red-eye effect in this photo – potoos have a phenomenal eye shine and in open country can be spotted at large distances. Potoos have a fondness for the full moon and on just one night it was actually bright enough that i got to hear the spooky, human-like potoo song… love it!



I got to see a few new families (for me) in Colombia, one of them being the Oilbird – monotypic family and the only frugivorous nocturnal species in the world. They roost and nest in caves, as shown in this photo, and fly out at night to feed on fruit which they pluck on the wing while hovering (sort-of). The cave entrance was knee deep in running water but well worth the wade and watching them fly around pre-dawn was also thrilling (they’re huge!).



Before this trip i had never seen an antpitta, but of course my love of the Asian pittas made me super keen to track some down. After all, i was finally in a place with a reasonable chance of finding one of these elusive ground-dwellers. As luck would have it i saw eight species in Colombia – a damn decent debut even if i say so myself. Like the pittas, the antpittas are suboscine passerines and occupy a similar ecological niche. They may not have the electric colours of the Asian pittas (their brown, black and rufous plumage making them even tougher to spot on the dark forest floor) but look at this exquisite Chestnut-crowned Antpitta – the combination of colour and crypsis is… well… beautiful!

Brown-banded Antpitta is a Colombian endemic and listed by Birdlife International as globally endangered. Yep, rare, small, camouflaged, ground-dwelling, secretive… the type of bird that birders lose their sanity over... until you get a view like this!

The story behind the next photo of a Chestnut-naped Antpitta involved creeping quickly but quietly along a narrow track under the cloud forest at dawn looking for shapes or movement around every bend. Asian birders call this technique a “pitta walk”. The idea is to capitalize on the fact that ground birds come out to feed on trails in the very early morning but since most are sensitive to ground vibration you have to walk quickly (and of course quietly) to try to surprise one around a corner. You would see more birds by lingering at the forest edge in the dim light of dawn but, if you want to see some of the super secretive ground birds, you have to make the choice to forego quantity.

Tawny Antpitta is a páramo dweller and easier to see than the forest antpittas but there is a story behind this sighting too. I only had one morning at this super high elevation site around 4000m asl and it was so foggy i couldn’t see my hand in front of my face let alone any birds. Soon it began to rain and in desperation i ran to a covered terrace at the park headquarters. Well, who should hop out from right underneath the terrace but this antpitta. allowing me a few foggy shots.

The antbirds are related to antpittas (though now often placed in a different family) and many of them are myrmecophiles, i.e. they follow army ant swarms to feed on any bugs scared up by the ants – some facultative, some obligate – nicknamed the “professional antbirds” (apologies to those who know that this is not the correct usage of the term myrmecophile, but they do love ants). Since time was short and i chose to concentrate on the Andes, I didn’t get to any really pristine or extensive lowland forest sites where i might find big army ant swarms and their followers; however, at one site i did find a small ant swarm by the entrance road and boy was i excited to watch Bicolored Antbirds hop about on the ground or less then a metre off it. They were so intent on catching bugs that they seemed oblivious to the not-so-hairy mammal with camera nearby (actually i was pretty hairy at that point).

Another beauty is this male Chestnut-backed Antbird who was kind enough to respond to my silly imitative whistle with gringo accent to hop out of the undergrowth into the sun-dappled trailside shrubs.

The antshrikes probably get their name from the shrike-like hook on the tip of upper mandible in some genera (like the shrike-vireo in the previous email). They are fairly large, shy birds of dense thickets in less forested habitats and are well camouflaged in the earthy tones of those habitats, yet at the same time stylishly dressed in classic black, brown and white. This female Black-crested Antshrike (male inserted into lower right of photo) gave me better looks than any others. If anyone can tell me why this species is called Sakesphorus canadensis, please send me an email.

Moving to a deeper shade of rufous, we continue with a different group of South American suboscine passerines, the woodcreepers. This combined image of Straight-billed and Montane Woodcreepers shoes just some of the variety in the woodcreepers, a group that have woodpecker like habits and a range of bill-shapes for a variety of different probing strategies.

The Funariidae, sometimes included in the same family as the woodcreepers, here represented by the beautiful Pearled Treerunner, are often called “ovenbirds” and get their name from the habit of just a few of their members of making oven-like mud nests with a side entrance, e.g. the horneros (“horno” is the Spanish word for oven and cognate to English “furnace”… Spanish has a habit of converting Latin “f” to “h” unless protected by “r” or “l”). These ovenbirds are not at all related to the North American Ovenbird, which is a wood-warbler of course, and also builds a closed nest with site entrance but not from mud.

Tyrant flycatchers are suboscines too - the only ones that were able to drift north in the Great American Interchange (when North and South America joined 3.5 million years ago) and undergo a major radiation at northern temperate latitudes. Part of their success in North America lies in the adoption of migratory habits and a largely insectivorous lifestyle — we don’t have enough fruit trees here to support the likes of cotingas; however, you might be surprised to find some familiar species like Eastern Kingbird feeding on fruit on their South American wintering grounds – a glimpse into the plasticity that made their conquest of North America possible. So we end this email where we began with another Santa Marta endemic, the globally endangered Santa Marta Bush Tyrant, showing off their lovely cinnamon costume, and showing how tough some high elevation foliage must be to perch on the tips like this.

What a wonderful world…

Christian (http://artusophotos.com/)

Colombia - Blue and Green

Colombia - Blue and Green

This installment begins again with another quintessentially Neotropical family, the toucans. When most people think of toucans, they tend to think more of the large black and yellow types, but the mountain toucans are a smaller group with soft blue plumage. Here’s a Black-billed Mountain Toucan.



I was surprised by the fact that there were very few corvids (crow family) in Colombia but I just loved the striking Black-collared Jay.



There are more tanagers in northern South America than you can shake a stick at. They are not just red and yellow but come in almost any colour you can imagine. Compare the various hues of blue and green starting with the Blue-capped Tanager.


From dark blue to light, the Blue-grey Tanager is common in towns and the countryside and often looks grey until you catch them in the right light.


Next, the vibrant blue and green of a pair of Swallow Tanagers. This tanager has sometimes been treated as a monotypic family because of several unusual features that differ from other tanagers including the swallow-shaped wings, broad and somewhat flat bill (compare with previous shot of Blue-grey Tanager for example), and shorter tarsi. These features are presumably related to their more aerial feeding style.


If you have ever birded in the tropics you’ll know the beauty of a mixed species feeding flock or “wave”. This next shot shows a green and blue moment with a male Black-capped Tanager perched alongside a male Blue-naped Chlorophonia. Of course the photo doesn’t show the six to eight other species of tanager, flycatcher and woodcreeper that were in the same tree at the time.


From a different mixed species flock, her are two more avian jewels: the globally vulnerable endemic Multicolored Tanager and the stylish Saffron-crowned Tanager photographed in the same wave (2 photos). When i saw this male Multicolored Tanager (left), I was combing through the flock looking for anything unusual and then there he was, like a spectral eclipse in my binoculars. It is always such a rush when something unexpected jumps up in front of you like that. The Saffron-crowned Tanager (right) is from the genus Tangara, famous for their luminescent patterns and their apparent lack of a song. I guess they decided that being so beautiful they don’t need to worry about talent.

Moving to purer greens, we have the Bay-headed Tanager, here represented by the Santa Marta race (other subspecies have blue underparts)

and the large Grass-green Tanager

Motmots are a fascinating Neotropical family, fairly close to the kingfishers but strictly forest bird, that are famous for their racket-tipped tails, which they swing from side to side like a jerky pendulum. The thing i find interesting is that their tail feathers don’t have the rackets when fresh but these form as the appropriate shafts quickly wear away. The Highland Motmot, treated variously as a subspecies of Blue-crowned Motmot or as a separate species, occurs at higher elevation than most and is less shy.

Rufous Motmot maybe should have been included in the last blog under red and yellow, but just look at that subtle blue-green sheen on the back and tail.

Another bird that combines green and rufous is the globally vulnerable Rusty-faced Parrot. Parrots may look gaudy in illustrations but their green plumage makes them very hard to see in the canopy.

Imagine zooming out when you view this female Spectacled Parrotlet feeding and you’ll see what i mean.

Speaking of green camouflage, check out this male and female Golden-breasted Fruiteater – a contingid, though much smaller than the fruit-crow and cock-of-the-rock, that looks dazzling in the plates but is super tough to see high in the canopy even when you hear their thin hissing call. These photos aren’t great but it was an effort just to see these beauties.

Last but not least is the dashing Yellow-browed Shrike-Vireo, though i bet the bugs don’t think they’re dashing when they see that honking bill probing their way.

Many of these photos can be viewed in largher resolution on my webpage: http://artusophotos.com/

Christian

Colombia - Red and Yellow

When i go on a birding trip, i usually like to share some photos with friends arranged in a photo diary or photo essay and usually organised by habitat or taxonomy. This time, i thought i'd so things a little differently and go with colour as my organising principle. This is the first in a series of blogs from my recent trip to Colombia – a fantastic country with mind-boggling biodiversity!

Colombia 1 – Red and Yellow:

We begin with a quintessentially Neotropical group, one of many of the fascinating South American radiation of suboscine passerines, famous for extravagant male plumages, but this Andean Cock-of-the-Rock is a female, and while she may not be quite as gaudy as her mate, she is a stunning bird that i felt very fortunate to see feeding in a ripe fig tree (what a wonder is the Ficus!).

Another stunning contingid is the Red-ruffed Fruit-Crow. Seeing my first crow-sized, black-backed streak flying through moist Andean forest was a thrill, and even more so when they perch up and show you their red neck ruff!

Everyone loves a trogon, so here is a beautiful male Masked Trogon, with an interesting tail pattern because the finer barring is very hard to see in the field.

While in the trogon family, how could i not tell the story of climbing to the mountaintop at dawn to be visited by this magnificent god! I fell to my knees to worship… and to get a better camera angle… he may not be "resplendent", but this near-endemic, range-restricted White-tipped Quetzal is nothing short of exquisite.

The tanagers are of course oscine passerines and arrived in South America later than the sub-oscines… but boy did they make up for lost with a staggering evolutionary colour explosion. Among the many red-coloured tanagers are Crimson-backed Tanager

and Flame-rumped Tanager.

Then, moving to orange, we have the gorgeous Lacrimose Mountain Tanager, seen here scattering nectar and revealing the tear-drop face pattern that gives the species their name.

After orange we see gold, i.e. the Golden Tanager

and then the dazzling yellow of the Grey-headed Tanager, a bird of the undergrowth that follows ant swarms.

Next, the endemic Rufous-browed Conebill, also related to tanagers, feeding in páramo shrubbery at high altitude.

The Rufous-capped Warbler may be familiar to North American birders – some of you may even have seen it north of the Mexican border. They reach the southernmost portion of their range in Colombia and are just as handsome as further north!

Next, a Tyrant-flycatcher that is easy to identify, the very attractive Yellow-bellied Chat-Tyrant.

Switching gears completely, how about this stunning female Golden-green Woodpecker! Who needs those redhead males when you're a blonde bombshell like this knockout!

Back to the passerines to look at the classy Chestnut-headed Oropendula. There is something about the oropendulas – kind of like icterids on steroids – that conjures up strange images of exotic rituals... gods, oops, i mean Montezuma, knows why!

And for those of you who love to watch an oriole build a nest, here is how a Yellow-rumped Cacique does it.

This is the first blog in this series from Colombia. You can view these photos in larger format at: http://artusophotos.com/

Christian