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Red-breasted Chat | Granatellus venustus
Rode granaatzanger | Granatelo mexicano
The Red-breasted Chat is a slender, long-tailed songbird of dry forest on the Pacific slope of Mexico. The male has a red breast and belly, a white throat and a grey back; the female is grey and buff. It was formerly placed with the New World warblers, but belongs to the cardinal family.
Voice
The song is a short series of clear, whistled notes, roughly chee chee chee choo. The call is a nasal, rasping chet.
Recording: Richard E. Webster — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · shortened to the first 60 s, mono · xeno-canto
Identification
14–16 cm. Long, graduated black tail with broad white corners, often cocked and fanned. The male has blue-grey upperparts, a black face with a white stripe behind the eye, a white throat, a narrow black band across the breast and a red breast, belly and undertail; the flanks are white. Birds of the Islas Marías lack the black breast band. The female has grey upperparts, a buff face and underparts and a pink-tinged undertail. Bill short and grey.
Confusion species
Grey-throated Chat Granatellus sallaei lives only in the lowlands of the Caribbean slope and on the Yucatán Peninsula; the male has a grey throat and lacks the white tail corners. Painted Whitestart Myioborus pictus is black with a white wing patch and lives higher in the mountains.
Habitat
Dense tropical dry and semi-evergreen forest, thorn scrub and gallery forest along rivers; from sea level to about 1500 m. It usually stays low in dense vegetation, where it searches for insects, cocking its fanned tail.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
Only in the guide area: the Pacific slope of Mexico, from Sinaloa and south-western Durango to Chiapas, including the Balsas basin in the interior, and the Islas Marías off the coast of Nayarit.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In the dry forest of Jalisco and Colima, for example around Chamela, and in the interior of Guerrero and Oaxaca. The nasal call from dense scrub is often the first sign; the male sometimes shows briefly on an open branch.
Conservation status
Not threatened (LC). Fairly common in suitable dry forest; this forest type is being converted to farmland in large parts of western Mexico. The population of the Islas Marías is sometimes treated as a separate species.
Scientific name
Granatellus venustus | Bonaparte, 1850
Bonaparte described the species in 1850 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. He introduced the genus Granatellus in that same work. Granatellus is a diminutive of New Latin granatus 'garnet-red', after the red on breast and belly. venustus is Latin for 'charming, graceful', after the handsome red, white and grey plumage. The specimen the first description was based on came from Comitán, Chiapas, Mexico.