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Purple Honeycreeper | Cyanerpes caeruleus
Purpersuikervogel | Mielero cerúleo
The Purple Honeycreeper is a small, short-tailed tanager with a long, curved bill that eats nectar, fruit and small insects. On Trinidad it is common in moist forest and also visits gardens with flowering trees and feeders offering fruit or sugar water.
Voice
Hardly any song is known. The call is a thin, buzzy zree, sometimes repeated, and a short, high, lisping note.
Recording: JAYRSON ARAUJO DE OLIVEIRA — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
10–11 cm, compact, with a short tail and a long, clearly curved black bill. The male is deep violet-blue with black lores, a narrow black mask and a black throat; wings and tail are black. The legs are bright yellow. The female is green above, with a buffy to ochre face and throat, a narrow blue malar stripe and pale underparts streaked with green, becoming yellowish on the belly.
Confusion species
Male Red-legged Honeycreeper Cyanerpes cyaneus has red legs, a pale turquoise crown, a black mantle and no black throat; the female has a whitish rather than buffy throat and no blue malar stripe. Blue Dacnis Dacnis cayana has a short, straight bill, and the male is turquoise rather than violet. Bananaquit Coereba flaveola has a white supercilium and a yellow breast.
Habitat
Moist lowland and hill forest and its edges, second growth, clearings with flowering or fruiting trees and shaded cacao plantations, also gardens. It forages in pairs or small groups, often in mixed flocks, in the upper and middle storeys, coming lower at flowering shrubs and feeders. The nest is a small cup in a tree or shrub.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Within the Caribbean a common resident on Trinidad; it is absent from Tobago. Outside the region in extreme eastern Panama and much of tropical South America north of Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Feeders with fruit and sugar water at lodges in the Northern Range, such as in the Arima Valley, often give close views, where males and females of Purple and Red-legged Honeycreepers can be compared side by side. Leg colour is the simplest feature.
Conservation status
Not threatened. A widespread and common species that also occurs in second growth and gardens.
Scientific name
Cyanerpes caeruleus | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Certhia caerulea; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Cyanerpes was introduced in 1899 by Oberholser. Cyanerpes is Greek, from kuanos 'dark blue' and herpēs 'creeper'. caeruleus is Latin for 'blue'. The specimen the first description was based on came from Suriname.