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Yellow-olive Flatbill | Tolmomyias sulphurescens
Groenkapbreedbektiran | Mosquero ojo blanco
The Yellow-olive Flatbill is an olive-green tyrant flycatcher with a broad, flat bill, found in forest and along forest edges in Trinidad. It closely resembles the Ochre-lored Flatbill, which occurs on the same island. Its nest is distinctive: a hanging, pear-shaped bag with a downward-pointing entrance tube.
Voice
A thin, buzzy or sibilant call, like tszeep, often repeated in a short series of two or three notes.
Recording: Mateus Gonçalves Santos — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · shortened to the first 60 s, mono · xeno-canto
Identification
13–14 cm. Crown and nape greyish olive, the back olive-green. A narrow whitish line runs above the lores and the eye has a thin pale ring. Adults have a pale, grey to light brown iris. The dusky wings have two yellow wing bars and yellow edges to the flight feathers. The throat is pale grey with a green wash, the breast greyish olive, the belly yellow. The bill is broad and flat, black above and pale below. The sexes are alike.
Confusion species
Ochre-lored Flatbill Tolmomyias flaviventris is brighter yellow below, with an ochre wash on the throat and breast, ochre-yellow lores and eye-ring and a dark iris; its head is yellowish green rather than greyish. Yellow-bellied Elaenia Elaenia flavogaster has a crest and a narrow bill. Scrub Greenlet Hylophilus flavipes lacks wing bars and has a pointed bill.
Habitat
Semi-evergreen and humid forest, drier forest, secondary forest, forest edges and shaded plantations, in the lowlands and hills. It hunts in the middle storey and canopy for insects, picked from the underside of leaves in short sallies; sometimes joins mixed flocks. The bag-shaped nest of rootlets and fibres hangs from a branch, often at a forest edge or over a stream and regularly near a wasp nest.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Resident in Trinidad; absent from Tobago and the rest of the region. Outside the region from southern Mexico through Central America and much of South America to northern Argentina.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In Trinidad in forest and along forest edges in the Northern Range and the lower-lying forested areas. Any flatbill should be checked carefully for iris, lores and head colour to separate it from Ochre-lored Flatbill.
Conservation status
Not threatened. The species has a very large range and tolerates secondary forest and plantations.
Scientific name
Tolmomyias sulphurescens | (Spix, 1825)
Spix described the species in 1825 as Platyrhynchus sulphurescens; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Tolmomyias was introduced in 1927 by Hellmayr. Tolmomyias is Greek, from tolma 'boldness' and muias 'fly' (flycatcher): 'bold flycatcher'. sulphurescens is Modern Latin for 'sulphur-tinged', from sulphur 'sulphur', after the yellow underparts. The specimen the first description was based on came from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.