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Chestnut Wood Quail | Odontophorus hyperythrus
Witoortandkwartel | Corcovado castaño | Uru-castanho
The Chestnut Wood Quail is a wood quail found only in the Andes of Colombia. It lives in groups on the floor of cloud forest in the Central and Western Andes. The white stripe behind the eye, which explains its Dutch name, distinguishes it from related species.
Voice
A fast, rhythmic and loud duet of rolling, repeated notes, mainly at dawn and dusk. Also soft contact notes within the group.
Recording: Julio Delgado — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · xeno-canto
Identification
25–27 cm, compact, with a short tail and a short, brown crest. Around the eye is bare, dark skin, with a conspicuous white stripe behind it on the ear coverts. The upperparts are brown, finely mottled black and ochre, with pale spots on the wings. In the male the face, throat, breast and belly are uniform chestnut; in the female the breast and belly are greyish brown. Juveniles are duller.
Confusion species
Rufous-fronted Wood Quail Odontophorus erythrops lives lower on the western slope and has a black throat with a white band and no white stripe behind the eye. Dark-backed Wood Quail Odontophorus melanonotus, in south-western Colombia, has a blackish back and no white on the head. Black-fronted Wood Quail Odontophorus atrifrons of northern Colombia has a black face.
Habitat
The floor of cloud forest and humid montane forest, also old secondary forest and forest edges near coffee plantations, roughly between 1600 and 2700 m. Groups search the leaf litter for seeds, fallen fruit and invertebrates. The nest is on the ground.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of the Andes and the west coast.
Range and movements
Endemic to Colombia: in the Central and Western Andes, including the slopes facing the Cauca and Magdalena valleys. Absent from the Eastern Andes. Absent from Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and the Galápagos.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Visit protected cloud-forest reserves in the Central Andes, where groups sometimes appear on forest trails or at feeding stations. Listen for the duet at dawn.
Conservation status
Least Concern. The habitat is fragmented by centuries of deforestation in the Colombian Andes, but the species also occurs in smaller forest remnants and in secondary forest.
Scientific name
Odontophorus hyperythrus | Gould, 1858
Gould described the species in 1858 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Odontophorus was introduced in 1816 by Vieillot. The genus name comes from Greek odous, odontos, 'tooth', and -phoros, 'bearing', after the serrated edge of the bill. The species name comes from Greek hupo, 'below', and eruthros, 'red', after the rufous underparts. The specimen the first description was based on came from Bogotá, Colombia.