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Red-crowned Ant Tanager | Habia rubica
Rode miertangare | Tángara hormiguera corona roja
The Red-crowned Ant Tanager is a medium-sized, dull-coloured songbird of the forest understorey, in which the male is dull red with a bright red crown stripe. It moves through the forest in noisy pairs or family groups, often with mixed flocks. In the guide area it lives in Mexico and northern Central America and very locally in Panama.
Voice
The song is a series of clear, whistled notes, often repeated in two- or three-syllable phrases, such as pee-cher pee-cher. Also a dry, rattling chatter and harsh chak calls with which the group keeps in contact.
Recording: Marcos E. Sosa — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
17–19 cm. A fairly robust, long-tailed songbird with a stout dark bill. The male is dull reddish brown, slightly paler and redder below, with a bright scarlet crown stripe narrowly bordered black on each side; the throat is slightly redder than the breast. The female is olive-brown, paler ochre-brown below, with a yellow-orange crown stripe and an ochre throat.
Confusion species
Red-throated Ant Tanager Driophlox fuscicauda is larger and darker; the male's rose-red throat contrasts with the dull red breast and the crown stripe lacks the black border; the female is browner with a yellow throat. It lives mainly in lowland forest and forest edges on the Caribbean slope. Females of Flame-colored Tanager Piranga bidentata and Summer Tanager Piranga rubra are yellower and live higher in the trees.
Habitat
Interior and edges of humid and semi-humid lowland and foothill forest, also semi-evergreen and drier seasonal forest with a dense understorey, mainly below 1200 m. It searches the lower and middle levels for insects and fruit, often in mixed flocks; sometimes follows army-ant swarms.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
In Mexico on the Pacific slope from Nayarit and Jalisco to Oaxaca and Chiapas and on the Caribbean slope from southern Tamaulipas and San Luis Potosí through Veracruz and the Yucatán Peninsula; further through Belize and Guatemala to Honduras and Nicaragua. In Panama very locally on the Pacific slope. Outside the guide area widespread in South America, south to Paraguay and north-eastern Argentina.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Usually detected by the harsh calls of a group in the forest understorey, for example near San Blas in Nayarit or in the forest of Calakmul in Campeche. The birds usually stay within cover.
Conservation status
Not threatened (LC). Widespread and locally common; declines where forest is fragmented or cleared.
Scientific name
Habia rubica | (Vieillot, 1817)
Vieillot described the species in 1817 as Staltator rubicus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Habia was introduced in 1840 by Blyth. Habia is a word in the Guaraní language of Paraguay for various finches and tanagers. rubica comes from the Medieval Latin rubicus 'reddish'. The specimen the first description was based on came from Paraguay.