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Ash-winged Antwren | Euchrepomis spodioptila
Asvleugelmiersluiper | Hormiguerito alicinéreo | Zidedê-de-asa-cinza
The Ash-winged Antwren is a small, slender antwren of the canopy of lowland rainforest in the northern Amazon basin and the Guiana Shield. In the guide area it reaches the western edge of its range and is scarce. It almost always travels with mixed flocks high in the trees.
Voice
The song is a high, thin, descending trill; in Colombia and Ecuador it ends in three separate notes, in Peru without them. The call is short and abrupt, sometimes given in series with shifting pitch.
Recording: Juan Freile — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · xeno-canto
Identification
10–11 cm, slender, with a thin bill and a fairly long tail. The male has a black crown and nape, a whitish supercilium and a thin dark eyeline on a grey face. Back and rump are rufous to chestnut; the wings are blackish with white tips to the coverts forming two wing bars. The underparts are pale grey. The female has a yellowish-brown crown, nape and upper back and a buffy-brown wash on the supercilium, throat, breast and flanks.
Confusion species
Chestnut-shouldered Antwren Euchrepomis humeralis lives mainly south of the Napo and has an olive-green mantle, a chestnut bend of the wing and a yellow belly. Rufous-rumped Antwren Euchrepomis callinota has a green mantle and yellow wing bars and lives in montane forest. Dot-winged Antwren Microrhopias quixensis is largely black with white wing spots.
Habitat
Canopy and upper mid-storey of humid lowland terra firme rainforest, mostly below 600 m. It forages for arthropods by moving quickly and acrobatically through dense foliage, usually in pairs and almost always with mixed flocks.
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 southeast and east. Ecuador: very scarce in the northeast. Peru: locally in the northeast. Absent from Bolivia and the Galápagos. Outside the guide area in southern Venezuela, the Guianas and northern Amazonian Brazil.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Search canopy mixed flocks in terra firme forest in northeastern Ecuador and Peru or southeastern Colombia, preferably from a tower. Look for an antwren with a rufous back and white wing bars.
Conservation status
Least Concern. Fairly common in most of its range but scarce in the guide area; numbers are thought to be slowly declining.
Scientific name
Euchrepomis spodioptila | (Sclater & Salvin, 1881) (GBIF: Terenura spodioptila)
Sclater & Salvin described the species in 1881 as Terenura spodioptila; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Euchrepomis was introduced in 2012 by Bravo, Remsen, Whitney & Brumfield. The genus name combines Greek euchrōs, 'ruddy, bright-coloured', and epōmis, 'point of the shoulder'. The species name comes from Greek spodios, 'ash-grey', and ptilon, 'feather, wing', for the grey wings. The specimen the first description was based on came from Bartica, Guyana.