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Tropical Parula | Setophaga pitiayumi
Maskerparulazanger | Parula pitiayumí
The Tropical Parula is the tropical counterpart of the Northern Parula and occurs from Mexico to Argentina. In the Caribbean it is resident only on Trinidad and Tobago, where it lives in the canopy of forest and plantations. It nests in tufts of epiphytes such as beard lichen.
Voice
The call is a sharp tsit. The song is a high, buzzy trill, often rising and sometimes preceded by a few separate notes: tsi tsi tsi zzzzzip; it is very similar to the song of Northern Parula.
Recording: Juan Freile — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
10–11 cm, small and short-tailed. Blue-grey above, with a greenish back patch and two white wing bars. Throat, breast and upper belly are yellow, in the male with an orange wash on the breast; lower belly and undertail are white. The male has a blackish mask from the bill to behind the eye; in the female the face is greyer and the mask faint or absent. No white eye-arcs.
Confusion species
Northern Parula Setophaga americana, a rare winter visitor to Trinidad and Tobago, has white arcs above and below the eye, no mask, a dark breast band in the male and less yellow on the belly. Among the resident birds of the islands no other species combines blue-grey upperparts, a green back patch, wing bars and a yellow breast.
Habitat
Canopy and edges of moist forest, lowland and montane rainforest, open woodland with large trees and cacao and coffee plantations with shade trees; mainly in hill country. It forages actively among the leaves, often in mixed flocks. The nest is built in a clump of epiphytes.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Resident on Trinidad and Tobago; not recorded elsewhere in the region. Outside the region from southern Texas and north-western Mexico through Central America and northern South America to northern Argentina and southern Brazil.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
On Trinidad best looked for at forest edges and in shaded plantations in the hills of the Northern Range; on Tobago in the forest of the Main Ridge. The buzzy song is the best clue, as the bird often stays high in the canopy.
Conservation status
Not threatened. A widespread species with a large population. Locally, the loss of forest and of shade trees in plantations plays a part.
Scientific name
Setophaga pitiayumi | (Vieillot, 1817)
Vieillot described the species in 1817 as Sylvia pitiayumi; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Setophaga was introduced in 1827 by Swainson. Setophaga is Greek, from sēs, sētos 'moth' and -phagos '-eating': 'moth-eater'. pitiayumi derives from 'Pitiayumí', the Guaraní name for this bird recorded by Félix de Azara in Paraguay. The specimen the first description was based on came from Paraguay.