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Brown-backed Solitaire | Myadestes occidentalis
Bruinrugsolitaire | Clarín jilguero
The Brown-backed Solitaire is a slender thrush with a grey head and underparts and an olive-brown back and wings. Its long, tinkling song, which tumbles down like a cascade of notes, is one of the best-known bird sounds of Mexican montane forests. It lives from north-western and eastern Mexico to Honduras.
Voice
The song is a long, accelerating, tinkling and metallic cascade of notes that begins hesitantly and runs downwards, often given for hours from a hidden perch. The call is a short, nasal rreh or a high whistle.
Recording: Richard E. Webster — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · shortened to the first 60 s, mono · xeno-canto
Identification
20–22 cm. Slender, with a short black bill and a long tail. Head, throat and underparts grey, the throat paler; white crescents above and below the eye and a narrow blackish malar stripe. Back and wings warm olive-brown; in flight a pale band on the underwing. Tail grey with white outer tail feathers. The sexes are alike. Juveniles brown with buff spots.
Confusion species
Slate-colored Solitaire Myadestes unicolor is entirely slate-grey without a brown back or malar stripe, and lives in more humid cloud forest. Townsend's Solitaire Myadestes townsendi, in northern Mexico, is entirely grey with a complete white eye-ring and a buff wing band. Grey Silky-flycatcher Ptiliogonys cinereus has a crest, yellow undertail coverts and a white patch in the tail.
Habitat
Humid and semi-humid montane forest: pine-oak, oak and cloud forest, especially with dense undergrowth, also ravines and wooded barrancas, mostly between 600 and 3500 m. Outside the breeding season some birds move to lower elevations. It eats berries and other fruit, and insects. It nests in a niche in a rock face, bank or tree.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
Occurs only in the guide area: in the mountains of Mexico, from southern Sonora and south-western Chihuahua along the Sierra Madre Occidental and from southern San Luis Potosí along the Sierra Madre Oriental southwards, through Oaxaca and Chiapas to Guatemala, El Salvador and central Honduras.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Usually heard before it is seen, for example at El Triunfo in Chiapas, in the Sierra Madre del Sur of Oaxaca and along the road from Durango to Mazatlán. It often sings from a tree at the edge of a ravine and then sits still, half hidden in the foliage.
Conservation status
Not threatened. Fairly common in suitable montane forest. In parts of Mexico it is trapped for the songbird trade.
Scientific name
Myadestes occidentalis | Stejneger, 1882
Stejneger described the species in 1882 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Myadestes was introduced in 1838 by Swainson. Myadestes is Greek, from muia 'fly' and edestēs 'eater': 'fly-eater'. occidentalis is Latin for 'western', after its range in western Mexico. The specimen the first description was based on came from Tonila, Jalisco, Mexico.