All species › Passerines › Finches › Puerto Rican Euphonia
Puerto Rican Euphonia | Chlorophonia sclateri
Puerto Ricaanse organist | Eufonia de Puerto Rico
The Puerto Rican Euphonia is a small, compact finch of Puerto Rico that lives almost entirely on mistletoe berries. It was long treated as a subspecies of Antillean Euphonia, which ranged from Hispaniola to the Lesser Antilles; since 2016 that species has been split into three, and the Puerto Rican form is one of them. Like the other Antillean euphonias, it is now placed in the genus Chlorophonia.
Voice
Both sexes sing, the female often more elaborately than the male. The song is a long, rambling series of rapid squeaks, whistles and tink notes, sometimes continuing almost without pause for up to twenty minutes. When foraging it gives a plaintive whistle and a soft tuk-tuk.
Recording: Omar Monzon Carmona — CC BY-NC 4.0 · Converted to mp3, mono, full length · iNaturalist
Identification
10–12 cm, rotund, with a short tail and a short thick bill. The male has an orange-yellow forehead, separated by a narrow dark blue band from the sky-blue crown and nape; the blue curves forward below the ear coverts. The rest of the head is dark violet-blue, the back black with a blue gloss, rump and uppertail coverts bright yellow, the throat yellow and the underparts dull orange-yellow. In the Hispaniolan bird the male's throat is dark. The female is olive-green with the same blue crown and nape, a yellow, olive-yellow or reddish forehead, a yellowish chin and throat and dull olive-yellow underparts.
Confusion species
No other euphonia lives on Puerto Rico, and the blue crown is diagnostic in both sexes. Puerto Rican Spindalis Spindalis portoricensis is larger, with white head stripes; the female is olive-grey without blue. Bananaquit Coereba flaveola has a white supercilium and a thin, decurved bill. Puerto Rican Bullfinch Melopyrrha portoricensis is larger and black with a rufous throat and undertail.
Habitat
The interior and edges of moist and dry forest, montane rainforest, limestone forest in the karst region and secondary forest, from sea level to the highest peaks at about 1300 m. Also shade coffee, as long as mistletoe grows there. It eats almost exclusively small mistletoe berries, plus other fruit and small arthropods, mostly in the canopy, in pairs or sometimes with mixed flocks. The domed nest with a side entrance, of lichen, moss and bark, is well hidden in moss or an epiphyte 3 to 20 m above the ground; breeding probably takes place year-round, mainly from March to June.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Only on Puerto Rico, throughout the island; after breeding some birds may move to lower elevations. All records in the map database come from Puerto Rico. The related Hispaniolan Euphonia Chlorophonia musica lives on Hispaniola and Lesser Antillean Euphonia Chlorophonia flavifrons from Barbuda and Antigua to Grenada.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
El Yunque National Forest, the karst forest of Río Abajo and the montane forest of Maricao are well-known sites. The bird usually stays high in the canopy and is first noticed by its plaintive whistle or tinkling song; a mistletoe clump with ripe berries is visited again and again by the same birds.
Conservation status
Not threatened. The range is small and numbers are unknown but believed stable. The species is locally common, for instance in El Yunque, and occurs in several protected areas.
Scientific name
Chlorophonia sclateri | (Sclater, 1854) (GBIF: Euphonia musica)
Sclater described the species in 1854 as Cyanophonia sclateri; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Chlorophonia was introduced in 1851 by Bonaparte. Chlorophonia combines Greek khlōros 'green' with the genus name Euphonia, after the green plumage. sclateri honours the British zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater (1829–1913), founder of the journal Ibis and a specialist in Neotropical birds. The specimen the first description was based on came from Puerto Rico.