All species › Passerines › Thrushes › White-eyed Thrush
White-eyed Thrush | Turdus jamaicensis
Witooglijster | Zorzal jamaicano
The White-eyed Thrush is Jamaica's second endemic thrush, alongside the White-chinned Thrush. It lives more secretively, in moist forest in the hills and mountains, and is heard more often than seen. Its loud, repetitive song is one of the best known sounds of Jamaica's montane forest.
Voice
The song is a series of repeated musical phrases, often including a whistled hee-haw; it is louder and less varied than that of a mockingbird, but similar in structure. It also gives harsh, high-pitched call notes.
No recording with a suitable Creative Commons licence is available for this species yet.
Identification
23–24 cm. The head is largely rufous-brown, with a white iris and a dark bill. Chin and throat are white streaked with chestnut-brown, and a white band separates the throat from the breast. The upperparts, wings and tail are slate grey, the underparts mostly pale grey-brown with a white lower belly and undertail. The legs are brownish. The sexes are alike. Juveniles have a heavily streaked breast.
Confusion species
White-chinned Thrush Turdus aurantius has a blackish head, a dark iris and orange bill and legs, and more often feeds in the open on lawns and roads. Rufous-throated Solitaire Myadestes genibarbis is smaller and slimmer, with a short bill and an orange-rufous throat. Mockingbirds Mimus lack the rufous head.
Habitat
Moist forest in the hills and mountains, from about 100 m to the highest peaks, also other woodland and shade coffee plantations. It forages in the lower storeys and on the ground for insects and fruit, and sings from a concealed perch high in a tree.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Only in Jamaica, across the wooded hills and mountains of the whole island, including the Blue and John Crow Mountains, the Cockpit Country and the central and western uplands. The species does not occur outside Jamaica.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Best early in the morning in the montane forest of the Blue Mountains, for example along the road at Hardwar Gap, and in the Cockpit Country. The song gives the bird away; after that, patient searching in the mid-storey is needed.
Conservation status
Not threatened. The range is small, but the population is considered stable and the species is fairly common in suitable habitat. Deforestation in the hills could cost habitat in the long term.
Scientific name
Turdus jamaicensis | Gmelin, 1789
Gmelin described the species in 1789 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Turdus was introduced in 1758 by Linnaeus. Turdus is the ordinary Latin word for 'thrush'. jamaicensis means 'of Jamaica', the island where the species lives. The specimen the first description was based on came from Jamaica.