All species › Passerines › New World warblers › White-lored Warbler
White-lored Warbler | Myiothlypis conspicillata
Witteugelzanger | Reinita embridada | Pula-pula-de-loro-branco
The White-lored Warbler occurs only in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia, as one of the bird species restricted to this isolated coastal mountain range. The scientific name conspicillata, 'spectacled', refers to the white lores and eye-ring.
Voice
The song is a fast, rising series of bright, chipping notes. The call is a dry tchip.
Recording: Jerome Fischer — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · xeno-canto
Identification
14 cm, with a fairly long tail. The head is grey, with a white loral spot and a white eye-ring. The upperparts are olive-green. The underparts are bright yellow, with an olive wash on the flanks. The sexes are alike. Young birds are duller and browner, with less white around the eye.
Confusion species
Santa Marta Warbler Myiothlypis basilica has a black head with white crown and eyebrow stripes and a white throat, and lives higher. Golden-crowned Warbler Basileuterus culicivorus is smaller, with a yellow to orange crown stripe between black bands and no white eye-ring.
Habitat
Understorey and lower strata of humid montane forest, older secondary forest, forest edges and shade coffee, roughly between 750 and 2200 m. It forages in pairs, often with mixed flocks, for insects in the lower vegetation. The nest, as in related species, is presumably a domed nest on or near the ground.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of the Andes and the west coast.
Range and movements
Colombia: only in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, on its slopes in Magdalena, La Guajira and Cesar. Absent from Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and the Galápagos. It does not occur outside the guide area.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Search the area around Minca and along the road to the San Lorenzo ridge, in the understorey of forest edges and shade coffee, where pairs often move with mixed flocks.
Conservation status
Near Threatened. The range is small and limited to a single mountain range, where much of the forest has been lost to agriculture and coffee growing; in the remaining forests and in shade coffee the species is still locally fairly common.
Scientific name
Myiothlypis conspicillata | (Salvin & Godman, 1880)
Salvin & Godman described the species in 1880 as Basileuterus conspicillatus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Myiothlypis was introduced in 1851 by Cabanis. The genus name combines Greek muia, 'fly', with thlupis, an unidentified small bird. The species name comes from Latin conspicillatus, 'spectacled', from conspicillum, 'lookout', after the white lores and eye-ring. The specimen the first description was based on came from San José, Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia.