All species › Passerines › Tyrant flycatchers and allies › Agile Tit-Tyrant
Agile Tit-Tyrant | Uromyias agilis
Behendige meestiran | Cachudito rabilargo | Tiranete-chapim-ágil
The Agile Tit-Tyrant is a small, long-tailed tyrant of cloud forest near the treeline in the northern Andes. It is closely tied to Chusquea bamboo and moves quickly and acrobatically through the foliage. It almost always joins mixed-species flocks.
Voice
The song is an excited-sounding jumble of trills and notes such as treerrr and tseeyk; the call is a brief, soft trill.
Recording: Andres Angulo — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · xeno-canto
Identification
13 cm, with a long, narrow tail and a short black bill with a yellow base to the lower mandible. Crown blackish-brown with a flat black crest, a broad white supercilium and a dark eye-stripe; the face is finely streaked black and white. Upperparts warm brown with heavy black streaks. Throat whitish with fine streaks; breast, flanks and upper belly pale yellow with blackish streaks, lower belly unmarked pale yellow. Iris dark brown. Sexes alike. Juveniles have two buffy wing bars.
Confusion species
Tufted Tit-Tyrant Anairetes parulus is smaller, with a shorter tail, a pale iris, a curled crest and a greyer, less streaked back; it lives more in open scrub. White-throated Tyrannulet Mecocerculus leucophrys is unstreaked, with a white throat and pale wing bars. Unstreaked Tit-Tyrant Uromyias agraphia occurs only in Peru and has unstreaked grey underparts; the ranges do not overlap.
Habitat
Cloud forest and elfin forest near the treeline, with a strong preference for dense stands of Chusquea bamboo; in Colombia from about 1800 to 3400 m, in Ecuador mostly between 2600 and 3500 m. It gleans insects from leaves and twigs and makes short upward hops or flights. It lives in pairs or small groups. The first nest described was woven from bamboo leaves and moss, high on a bamboo stem.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of the Andes and the west coast.
Range and movements
Colombia: in the Central and Eastern Andes. Ecuador: in the Andes, on the west side south to Cotopaxi, on the east side to north-eastern Loja. Peru and Bolivia: absent. Absent from the Galápagos. Outside the guide area in the Andes of western Venezuela (Mérida and Táchira).
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Search bamboo thickets along mountain roads near the treeline and watch for mixed flocks; the bird moves quickly and seldom stays still for long.
Conservation status
Least Concern. The species is locally common in Colombia and occurs in protected areas in Colombia and Ecuador; its range is fragmented.
Scientific name
Uromyias agilis | (Sclater, 1856) (GBIF: Anairetes agilis)
Sclater described the species in 1856 as Euscarthmus agilis; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Uromyias was introduced in 1927 by Hellmayr. The genus name comes from Greek oura, 'tail', and New Latin myias, 'flycatcher', from Greek muia, 'fly'. The specific name is Latin agilis, 'agile, nimble'. The specimen the first description was based on came from Bogotá, Colombia.