All species › Passerines › Ovenbirds and woodcreepers › Chaco Earthcreeper
Chaco Earthcreeper | Tarphonomus certhioides
Chacoaardkruiper | Bandurrita chaqueña | Bandurrita-do-chaco
The Chaco Earthcreeper is a small, brown ovenbird with a slightly decurved bill of dry Chaco woodland. It feeds on the ground and in the lowest parts of bushes and trees. In the guide area it occurs only in south-eastern Bolivia.
Voice
The song is a loud, accelerating series of clear notes. Also gives short, sharp calls.
Recording: Franco Vushurovich — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · xeno-canto
Identification
16 cm, with a medium-length, slightly decurved bill. The upperparts are brown, the forehead tinged rufous, the wings with rufous patches and the tail rufous. The throat is white and contrasts with the greyish-buff breast and belly. The sexes are alike.
Confusion species
Bolivian Earthcreeper Tarphonomus harterti is larger and greyer, without a rufous forehead, and lives higher, in dry Andean valleys. Rufous Hornero Furnarius rufus is larger, more uniformly rufous above, with a straight bill, and walks mainly in open terrain. Narrow-billed Woodcreeper Lepidocolaptes angustirostris climbs trunks and has an obvious white supercilium and a streaked breast.
Habitat
Dry Chaco woodland and thorn scrub with an open understorey, from the lowlands up to about 1000 m. It forages on the ground among leaf litter and under bushes for insects and other invertebrates. It nests in cavities, including old nests of other birds.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of the Andes and the west coast.
Range and movements
Absent from Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and the Galápagos. Bolivia: in the Chaco of the south-east, in southern Santa Cruz, eastern Chuquisaca and Tarija. Outside the guide area in western Paraguay and northern and central Argentina.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Walk slowly through dry Chaco woodland with open ground and watch for a small brown bird rummaging in the leaf litter. In the morning the song gives it away.
Conservation status
Least Concern. Clearance of the Chaco for farming and cattle ranching is reducing its habitat.
Scientific name
Tarphonomus certhioides | (d'Orbigny, ACVMD & de Lafresnaye, 1838) (GBIF: Upucerthia certhioides)
D'Orbigny, ACVMD & de Lafresnaye described the species in 1838 as Anabates certhioides; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Tarphonomus was introduced in 2007 by Chesser & Brumfield. The genus name comes from Greek tarphos, 'thicket', and nomos, 'place for living', after the habitat of thickets in arid scrub. The species name comes from Certhia (treecreeper) and Greek -oidēs 'resembling', meaning 'treecreeper-like'. The specimen the first description was based on came from Corrientes, Argentina.