All species › Passerines › Ovenbirds and woodcreepers › Common Miner
Common Miner | Geositta cunicularia
Gewone holengraver | Minero común | Curriqueiro
The Common Miner is a small, compact ground bird of open, bare terrain, built like a lark and behaving like a wheatear. It runs rapidly over sand and short grass, often stands upright and flicks its tail. It digs its nest at the end of a long tunnel in a sandy bank or slope. The species has a large range in southern South America; in the guide area it lives on the high plateaus and locally on the coast of Peru and Bolivia.
Voice
The song, often given in display flight or from a rock, is a shrill, rapid, trilled de-dirr-rr-rrr, sometimes repeated. Calls include a high keep and a soft pip in flight.
Recording: JAYRSON ARAUJO DE OLIVEIRA — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · xeno-canto
Identification
14–16 cm, with a fairly short, slightly decurved, dark bill and a short tail. The upperparts are sandy greyish brown, with a pale supercilium. The breast is pale brown with brown streaks or spots, and the belly is creamy white. In flight it shows a broad cinnamon-rufous wing patch and a tail with a pale, rufous base and a dark terminal band. The forms differ: juninensis in central Peru is paler, with few breast streaks, and the coastal form georgei is yellower below and more heavily streaked. The sexes are alike.
Confusion species
Puna Miner Geositta punensis is smaller and paler, with an unstreaked breast. Rufous-banded Miner Geositta rufipennis is larger and greyer, without breast streaks. Slender-billed Miner Geositta tenuirostris has a clearly longer, thin, decurved bill. Coastal Miner Geositta peruviana on the Peruvian coast is paler and unstreaked. Ground tyrants (Muscisaxicola) are slimmer, with a straight, thin bill and a black tail without a rufous base.
Habitat
Open, flat to gently sloping terrain with sandy or gravelly soil, short grass and scattered rocks and low shrubs: the puna and altiplano up to about 5000 m, and in southern Peru also coastal desert, dunes and dry plains from sea level. It forages on foot for insects and other invertebrates, also seeds. The nest is in a chamber at the end of a horizontal tunnel in an earthen or sandy bank; the clutch is two or three eggs, laid in the austral summer.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of the Andes and the west coast.
Range and movements
In Peru in the Andes from Junín and Huancavelica south to the borders with Bolivia and Chile, on the western slope from Arequipa to Tacna, and on the coast of Ica and Arequipa. In Bolivia on the altiplano and in the western Andes, east to Cochabamba. Absent from Colombia, Ecuador and the Galápagos. Outside the guide area in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and southern Brazil.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Look on flat, sandy or gravelly patches of puna and along road verges and dried-out shores; the bird moves in short sprints and then stands upright. In the breeding season it gives itself away by its song flight.
Conservation status
Least Concern. The species has a large range and is locally common; numbers are thought to be stable.
Scientific name
Geositta cunicularia | (Vieillot, 1816)
Vieillot described the species in 1816 as Alauda cunicularia; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Geositta was introduced in 1837 by Swainson. The genus name combines Greek geō-, 'earth, ground', with Sitta, the nuthatch genus. The species name comes from Latin cunicularius, 'miner, burrower' (from cuniculus, 'rabbit, burrow'), after its nesting in self-dug burrows. The specimen the first description was based on came from Buenos Aires, Argentina.