All species › Jacamars and puffbirds › Puffbirds › Pied Puffbird
Position in the tree Birds Aves › Birds with a flexible palate Neognathae › All other modern birds Neoaves › Landbirds Telluraves › Raptors, owls, kingfishers and woodpeckers Afroaves › Mousebirds, rollers and woodpeckers Coraciimorphae › Trogons and cavity nesters Cavitaves › Hornbills, kingfishers and woodpeckers Picocoraciae › Kingfishers, bee-eaters and woodpeckers Picodynastornithes
Pied Puffbird | Notharchus tectus
Bonte baardkoekoek | Buco pío
The Pied Puffbird is the smallest Notharchus, a black-and-white puffbird with a narrow white eyebrow. It often sits in pairs high on a bare branch at the forest edge. In the guide area it lives from south-eastern Nicaragua to Panama.
Voice
A high, thin, plaintive whistled series, pee-pee-pee-peeur-peeur-peeur, with the last notes falling. Pairs sometimes sing alternately.
Recording: JAYRSON ARAUJO DE OLIVEIRA — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
15–16 cm. Upperparts black, with a white forehead band finely spotted black and a narrow white eyebrow. A white stripe on the shoulder shows in flight and on perched birds. Throat and underparts white, with a broad black breast band and black-barred flanks. The tail is black with small white spots at the base and tip. The bill is black and fairly heavy. Sexes alike.
Confusion species
White-necked Puffbird Notharchus hyperrhynchus and Black-breasted Puffbird Notharchus pectoralis are much larger, without a white eyebrow or white shoulder stripe. Black-breasted Puffbird also has a large white ear patch.
Habitat
Edges of humid lowland forest, tall secondary forest, gallery forest and clearings with tall scattered trees, also plantations with shade trees, mainly below 500 m. It perches high on a bare branch and sallies to insects in the foliage. It nests in a cavity in an arboreal termite nest.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
Lowlands of south-eastern Nicaragua (Río San Juan) and northern and eastern Costa Rica, mainly on the Caribbean side, and in Panama on both slopes, mainly in the centre and east of the country. Outside the guide area in western Colombia and Ecuador and, as another subspecies, in northern South America and Amazonia.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Regularly seen on the Sarapiquí plain in northern Costa Rica and along Pipeline Road (Camino del Oleoducto) in Panama. It pays to scan the tops of tall trees at the forest edge; the bird often stays on the same branch for a long time.
Conservation status
Not threatened. Fairly scarce and local in Costa Rica, fairly common in Panama.
Scientific name
Notharchus tectus | (Boddaert, 1783)
Boddaert described the species in 1783 as Bucco tectus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Notharchus was introduced in 1863 by Cabanis & Heine. Notharchus is Greek, from nōthēs 'sluggish' and arkhos 'leader': 'sluggish chief', after the lethargic behaviour of puffbirds. tectus is Latin for 'covered', from tegere 'to cover', after the black crown. The specimen the first description was based on came from Cayenne, French Guiana.