All species › Woodpeckers and allies › Toucans › Collared Aracari
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Collared Aracari | Pteroglossus torquatus
Halsbandarassari | Tucancillo collarejo
The Collared Aracari is the most widespread aracari in the guide area, from southern Mexico to Panama. It is a slim toucan with a long tail that moves through the forest in noisy groups of six to fifteen birds, one after another. At night the members of a group roost together in a tree cavity.
Voice
A high, sharp, squeaky pseek or two-note pi-tseek, often repeated by the members of a group.
Recording: Kent Livezey — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · shortened to the first 60 s, mono · xeno-canto
Identification
39–43 cm. Head, throat and neck black, with a faint chestnut collar on the nape. Back and wings dark green, rump red, tail long and dark greenish black. The underparts are yellow with a red wash, with a round black spot in the centre of the breast and a broad red-and-black band across the belly; the thighs are chestnut. Iris yellow, bare skin around the eye red. The upper mandible is ivory to dull yellow with blackish marks along the cutting edge, the lower mandible black. The sexes are alike.
Confusion species
Fiery-billed Aracari Pteroglossus frantzii (Pacific side of southern Costa Rica and western Panama) has an orange-red upper mandible and a broader, redder belly band. Keel-billed Toucan Ramphastos sulfuratus and Yellow-throated Toucan Ramphastos ambiguus are much larger, with a black belly and a yellow throat and breast.
Habitat
Humid and semi-humid lowland forest, the seasonal forest of Yucatán, tall secondary forest, forest edges, gallery forest and plantations with tall trees; mostly below 1000 m, locally up to about 1200 m. It eats mainly fruit, also insects, eggs and nestlings. It nests and roosts in a tree cavity, often an old woodpecker hole.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
On the Gulf and Caribbean side from southern Veracruz and northern Oaxaca through Tabasco and the Yucatán Peninsula to Belize, Guatemala and Honduras; on the Pacific side from Chiapas through Guatemala to El Salvador. Further through Nicaragua to Costa Rica, where it lives on the Caribbean slope and in the north-west on the Pacific side, and through Panama to Darién; in western Panama only on the Caribbean side. Outside the guide area in Colombia, north-western Venezuela and western Ecuador, with forms once treated as separate species.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Common at Tikal and in Belize, on the Yucatán Peninsula, at La Selva in Costa Rica and along Pipeline Road (Camino del Oleoducto) in Panama. Groups fly across a clearing one by one with fast wingbeats; one bird usually means more are following.
Conservation status
Least Concern. It disappears where forest is cleared completely but also occurs in secondary forest and semi-open country with trees.
Scientific name
Pteroglossus torquatus | (Gmelin, 1788)
Gmelin described the species in 1788 as Ramphastos torquatus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Pteroglossus was introduced in 1811 by Illiger. Pteroglossus is Greek, from pteron 'feather' and glōssa 'tongue', after the frayed, feather-like tongue. torquatus is Latin for 'collared', after the dark band across the yellow breast. The specimen the first description was based on came from Veracruz, Mexico.