Chestnut-belted Gnateater
Conopophaga aurita
Plump, short-tailed bird of Amazonian rainforest. Both sexes have a chestnut breast. Male has a black face and throat and a bright white tuft behind the eye. Female lacks black in her plumage, and instead of a tuft she has a pale line through her face. Female is similar to female Ash-throated Gnateater but has plain, unmarked wings. Birds in central Brazil south of the Amazon are now considered a separate species, Black-breasted Gnateater; male Chestnut-belted has less black extending only to upper breast; female looks almost identical. Usually seen on a low perch in the understory and may resemble a small antpitta. Vocalizations include a rattling, metallic trill and a short, soft “chuff”.
Identification
It is a small dark bird with a relatively stout bill, brown upperparts and crown (the latter often tinged rufous), a white supercilium, and pinkish-grey legs. The male has a black frontlet, face and throat, a rufous chest, and buff or white belly. The female has a rufous face, throat and chest, and a buff or white belly. Males of the subspecies snethlageae and pallida are distinctive, as the black of the face and throat extends well onto the central chest, with rufous of the underparts limitied to the edge of the black chest.
Taxonomy
The chestnut-belted gnateater 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 thrushes in the genus Turdus and coined the binomial name Turdus auritus. Gmelin based his description on "Le fourmilier à oreilles blanches" that had been described and illustrated in 1778 by French polymath Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. Buffon had access to both male and female specimens that had been collected in Cayenne. The chestnut-belted gnateater is now placed with eight other gnateaters in the genus Conopophaga that was introduced in 1816 by the French ornithologist Louis Pierre Vieillot. It is the type species of the genus. The genus name combines the Ancient Greek kōnōps meaning "gnat" with -phagos meaning "-eating". The specific name aurita if from Latin auritus meaning "-eared" or "long eared".<p>Four subspecies are recognised:
- Scientific name
- Conopophaga aurita
- Authority
- (Gmelin, JF, 1789)
- Order
- Passeriformes
- Family
- Conopophagidae
- Genus
- Conopophaga
Range and habitat
The range of the chestnut-belted gnateater is throughout the Amazon Basin, centered on the Amazon River. The following range limits are: it covers the entire downstream half of the regions in the south Basin and does not extend into Bolivia. The limits in the west are eastern and northeastern Peru with parts of northeast Ecuador and southern Colombia; the limit in this area in the west and northwest is the Rio Negro and the species is not found in the north central Amazon Basin of most of Brazil's Roraima state.<p>The range in the northeast Basin beyond the Amazon River outlet extends through Amapá state into the Guianas to the Atlantic coast, and the central and eastern Guiana Shield to include only eastern Guyana.
- Migration
- Resident species
Conservation
- Population trend
- declining
Photos
Distribution
Bird Calls
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