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Sepia-capped Flycatcher | Leptopogon amaurocephalus
Bruinkapleptopogon | Mosquero gorra parda
The Sepia-capped Flycatcher is a slender, olive Leptopogon flycatcher with a brown crown, a dark ear patch and pale wing bars. A characteristic habit is lifting one wing above the back from time to time. In the guide area it lives from south-eastern Mexico to Panama.
Voice
A sharp, explosive opening that runs into a dry, rapid rattle, mostly heard from the middle levels of the forest.
Recording: Aran Rodrigues Cardoso — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
13–14 cm. Crown dark sepia-brown. Face greyish with fine pale speckling and a dark crescent on the ear coverts. Upperparts olive-green. Wings dark with two clear ochre wing bars and pale edges to the flight feathers. Throat greyish, breast olive-grey, belly pale yellow. Bill thin, pale below. Sexes alike.
Confusion species
Slaty-capped Flycatcher Leptopogon superciliaris (foothill and montane forest in Costa Rica and Panama) has a slate-grey rather than brown crown and a more crisply marked black-and-white face. Ochre-bellied Flycatcher Mionectes oleagineus lacks wing bars and the ear patch and has an ochre belly.
Habitat
Middle levels and understorey of humid lowland and foothill forest, often along streams and ravines, also mature secondary forest and forest edges, from sea level to about 1200 m. It perches upright and sallies to leaves to take insects; sometimes joins mixed flocks. It also eats small fruits.
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, from southern Veracruz and northern Oaxaca through Chiapas, Tabasco and the southern Yucatán Peninsula, and on through Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua to Costa Rica and Panama. Outside the guide area over much of South America, south to north-eastern Argentina.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Watch for the rattling call and the lifted wing: an olive flycatcher that raises one wing is usually a Leptopogon or a Mionectes.
Conservation status
Not threatened. Fairly common but inconspicuous; disappears where forest is completely cleared.
Scientific name
Leptopogon amaurocephalus | Cabanis, 1846
Cabanis described the species in 1846 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Leptopogon was introduced in 1844 by Cabanis. Leptopogon is Greek, from leptos 'fine, slender' and pōgōn 'beard', after the fine bristles at the base of the bill. amaurocephalus is Greek, from amauros 'dark, dusky' and -kephalos '-headed', after the dark brown cap. The specimen the first description was based on came from São Paulo, Brazil.