Fulvous-crested Tanager
Tachyphonus surinamus
An uncommon tanager of lowland and foothill rainforest. Male is black with orange flanks, white tufts around the edges of the wings, and yellow or orange crown and rump. Female is yellow-olive with a gray crown and white or yellowish throat; some females have a broken yellow eyering. Usually found in pairs that forage in lower to middle levels of the forest, sometimes with mixed-species flocks.
Taxonomy
In 1760 the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson included a description of the fulvous-crested tanager in the supplement to his Ornithologie based on a specimen collected Suriname. He used the French name Le merle de Surinam and the Latin name Merula surinamensis. Although Brisson coined Latin names, these do not conform to the binomial system and are not recognised by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. When in 1766 the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus updated his Systema Naturae for the twelfth edition he added 240 species that had been previously described by Brisson in his Ornithologie. One of these was the fulvous-crested tanager. Linnaeus included a terse description, coined the binomial name Turdus surinamus and cited Brisson's work. The present genus Tachyphonus was introduced by the French ornithologist Louis Pierre Vieillot in 1816. There are four subspecies.
- Scientific name
- Tachyphonus surinamus
- Authority
- (Linnaeus, 1766)
- Order
- Passeriformes
- Family
- Thraupidae
- Genus
- Tachyphonus
Range and habitat
- Migration
- Resident species
Conservation
- Population trend
- declining
Photos
Distribution
Bird Calls
Other Birds
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Cryptopezus nattereri
Small plump bird with a short tail, long legs, and large eyes. Very secretive and hard to spot; walks quietly on the ground of lowland humid and montane forests with a dense understory. Olive-brown above and spotted below with a pale throat. The song is a series of whistled notes increasing in volume towards the end.
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Corvus sierramadrensis
Uncommon small black crow. Plumage has an iridescent dark blue sheen when seen up close. Compared to much more common Philippine Large-billed Crow, note present species’ larger-headed appearance, small bare patch behind eye, and somewhat stouter-looking bill. Formerly treated as part of a more generic “Slender-billed Crow” that ranged from the Philippines to Sulawesi; Sierra Madre Crow is restricted to montane forests in northern and central Luzon. Often encountered singly, in pairs, or as small flocks in flight over swathes of contiguous forest. Calls are quite different from those of Philippine Large-billed Crow, being rather high-pitched short caws: “weh, weh, weh!”
Fork-tailed Palm Swift
Tachornis squamata
Unmistakable swift, with a slender body and a long deeply forked tail, usually held closed. Dark-brown above and whitish below. Often seen in groups and invariably near stands of palm trees in urban and rural areas in which they nest. Steals feathers from the bodies of other live birds in flight.
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