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Flame-throated Warbler | Oreothlypis gutturalis
Vuurkeelzanger | Reinita flamígera
The Flame-throated Warbler is a small warbler of the high mountains of Costa Rica and western Panama, with a grey back and a fiery orange throat. It occurs only in the guide area and searches high in oak forest and along forest edges for insects, usually in mixed flocks.
Voice
The song is a high, thin, buzzy trill that often rises in pitch, tsi-tsi-zzzzeee. The call is a short, sharp tsit.
Recording: GABRIEL LEITE — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
11–12 cm. Upperparts blue-grey with a black patch in the centre of the mantle. Lores and cheeks blackish, forming a dark mask. Throat and breast fiery orange, belly and undertail coverts whitish with grey flanks. Wings and tail grey, without obvious wingbars. Bill thin and pointed. The female is slightly duller, with a less deep orange throat; young birds have a yellowish throat and a greyer mantle.
Confusion species
Tropical Parula Setophaga pitiayumi has a yellow to orange-yellow throat and breast, but an olive-green back patch, white wingbars and a yellow belly; it lives mainly lower in the mountains. Blackburnian Warbler Setophaga fusca, a winter visitor and passage migrant, also has an orange throat, but black-and-white striped upperparts, a large white wing patch and an orange supercilium.
Habitat
Canopy and edges of oak forest and other montane rainforest, mostly from about 2000 m to the treeline above 3000 m; also tall scrub at the edge of the páramo and pastures with scattered trees. It searches moss, epiphytes and the foliage of outer branches for insects and spiders.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
Endemic to the guide area: the Cordillera Central and Cordillera de Talamanca in Costa Rica and the adjoining mountains of western Panama, in Chiriquí and northern Veraguas.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Regularly seen in the oak forests along the Pan-American Highway over Cerro de la Muerte and around San Gerardo de Dota in Costa Rica, and on the slopes of Volcán Barú in Panama. The rising trill high in the canopy often gives it away.
Conservation status
Not threatened (LC). The range is small, but the species is fairly common in suitable montane forest; much of it lies within protected areas.
Scientific name
Oreothlypis gutturalis | (Cabanis, 1861)
Cabanis described the species in 1861 as Compsothlypis gutturalis; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Oreothlypis was introduced in 1884 by Ridgway. Oreothlypis is Greek, from oros 'mountain' and thlupis, an unidentified small bird, here a warbler: 'mountain warbler', after the type locality on Irazú volcano. gutturalis is Medieval Latin for 'of the throat', from guttur 'throat', after the flame-orange throat. The specimen the first description was based on came from Irazú volcano, Costa Rica.