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Tacarcuna Tapaculo | Scytalopus panamensis
Panamese tapaculo | Tapaculo de Tacarcuna
The Tacarcuna Tapaculo is a little-known, dark grey tapaculo with a very small range in the montane forest of Darién, on the border of Panama and Colombia.
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Voice
Poorly documented; like other tapaculos a repeated series of short notes from dense vegetation.
Recording: Juan Miguel Ruiz-Ovalle — CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 · shortened to the first 60 s, mono · xeno-canto
Identification
11 cm, with a short tail and sturdy legs. Male dark slate-grey, with a whitish eyebrow; flanks and undertail-coverts brown with dark bars. Female and juveniles browner.
Confusion species
Choco Tapaculo Scytalopus chocoensis lives lower on the same slopes and lacks the whitish eyebrow. Silvery-fronted Tapaculo Scytalopus argentifrons occurs only much further west.
Habitat
Dense understorey of humid montane and cloud forest on a few isolated mountain tops, roughly between 1000 and 1500 m. It lives hidden on and just above the forest floor.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
Endemic to a small area in eastern Darién, on Cerro Tacarcuna and Cerro Malí and the adjacent Colombian slopes.
How and when to look
Reachable only on a multi-day trek to remote mountain tops in eastern Darién. Listening for calling birds in the dense understorey is the only practical way to find it.
Conservation status
Near Threatened. The range is very small and remote; the montane forest is largely intact, but the species is little studied. No range map is available for this species.
Scientific name
Scytalopus panamensis | Chapman, 1915
Chapman described the species in 1915 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. The genus Scytalopus was introduced in 1837 by Gould. Scytalopus is Greek, from skutalē 'stick, cudgel' and pous 'foot', after the stout legs. panamensis means 'from Panama', where the species was discovered on Cerro Tacarcuna. The specimen the first description was based on came from Cerro Tacarcuna, eastern Panama.