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Lovely Cotinga | Cotinga amabilis
Azuurcotinga | Cotinga azuleja
The Lovely Cotinga is a medium-sized cotinga of the canopy of humid forest on the Caribbean side of the northern part of the guide area. The male is glossy turquoise-blue with a purple throat and belly patch, the female greyish brown with pale scaling. The species lives only from south-eastern Mexico to Costa Rica and is therefore endemic to the guide area.
Voice
Usually silent. In flight the male's wings can produce a soft whistling or rattling sound.
Recording: Jafeth Zablah — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
18–20 cm. The male is glossy turquoise-blue, with black spotting on the upperparts where the dark feather bases show through. Throat deep purple and a large purple patch in the centre of breast and belly. Wings and tail black with blue edges. The female is dark greyish brown above with pale feather edges, giving a scaled look, and paler buffy brown below with dark spots. Round head, dark eye, short black bill and fairly short tail.
Confusion species
Turquoise Cotinga Cotinga ridgwayi is very similar but lives on the Pacific side of southern Costa Rica and western Panama; Blue Cotinga Cotinga nattererii lives only in central and eastern Panama. Their ranges do not overlap. The female resembles other brown canopy fruit-eaters, but stands out by its round head, short bill and scaled upperparts.
Habitat
Canopy and edges of humid evergreen forest in the lowlands and especially the foothills, locally up into the lower mountains, also tall secondary forest and clearings with scattered tall trees. It eats mainly fruit. It often sits motionless for long periods on a bare branch above the canopy.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
Caribbean slope of south-eastern Mexico, through Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua to Costa Rica. Does not occur outside the guide area.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Scarce and seldom seen. The best chance is in the Caribbean foothills of Costa Rica, by scanning the highest bare treetops and fruiting trees from a lookout or forest edge.
Conservation status
Not threatened, but scarce and local throughout; declines where humid forest disappears.
Scientific name
Cotinga amabilis | Gould, 1857
Gould described the species in 1857 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Cotinga was introduced in 1760 by Brisson. Cotinga comes via French from a Tupi name for these birds, by the usual account meaning 'washed white'. amabilis is Latin for 'lovely', after the dazzling blue-and-purple male. The specimen the first description was based on came from Verapaz, Guatemala.