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Golden-billed Saltator | Saltator aurantiirostris
Goudsnavelsaltator | Pepitero piquigualdo | Bico-duro
The Golden-billed Saltator is a grey saltator with an orange bill, a black mask and a white stripe behind the eye, of dry mountain slopes and valleys in the central and southern Andes. It lives in scrub, hedgerows and gardens and sings from an open perch. In the guide area it is a bird of Peru and Bolivia.
Voice
The song is a loud, varied series of whistled and twittering phrases, often sustained for a long time from a perch. The call is a sharp, metallic tick.
Recording: Gilmar Vergara Álvarez — CC BY-NC 4.0 · xeno-canto
Identification
20 cm, with a stout, orange to golden-yellow bill and a fairly long tail. The crown and upperparts are grey. The face is black, from the bill across the ear coverts, and a black band crosses the breast; above it lies a pale, white to ochre throat. A white stripe runs behind the eye. The underparts are greyish buff, ochre towards the belly. The outer tail feathers have white tips in some subspecies. The female has a narrower, less black breast band. Young birds have a dark bill and a fainter face pattern.
Confusion species
Black-cowled Saltator Saltator nigriceps of north-western Peru has an entirely black head and a red bill. Bluish-grey Saltator Saltator coerulescens and Green-winged Saltator Saltator similis in the lowlands have a black bill and no black mask. Masked Saltator Saltator cinctus has a blue-grey back, a long, graduated tail with white tips and lives in humid cloud forest.
Habitat
Dry scrub, hedgerows and field edges, riparian growth in dry valleys, open Polylepis woodland, gardens and village edges, in the Andes roughly between 1500 and 3800 m, in southern Bolivia also lower in the Chaco. It forages in shrubs and on the ground for seeds, fruit, flowers, buds and insects. The nest is a cup in a shrub.
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, mainly on the western slope and in the dry inter-Andean valleys, from north to south. In Bolivia widespread in the Andes, the dry valleys of the eastern slope and the Chaco in the south-east. Absent from Colombia, Ecuador and the Galápagos. Outside the guide area in Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and extreme southern Brazil.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Search hedgerows and scrub around villages and fields in the dry valleys near Cusco or Cochabamba; the orange bill and black mask stand out when a bird sings in the open on a shrub.
Conservation status
Least Concern. Common and tolerant of small-scale farmland; it also lives in hedgerows and gardens.
Scientific name
Saltator aurantiirostris | Vieillot, 1817
Vieillot described the species in 1817 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Saltator was introduced in 1816 by Vieillot. The genus name comes from Latin saltator, 'dancer'. The species name combines Latin aurantius, 'orange', and rostrum, 'bill'. The specimen the first description was based on came from Paraguay.