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White-fronted Nunbird | Monasa morphoeus
Witvoorhoofdtrappist | Monja frentiblanca
The White-fronted Nunbird is a slate-grey puffbird with a coral-red bill and a white 'forehead' of stiff feathers around the base of the bill. Unlike most puffbirds it lives in noisy groups, which often travel with mixed flocks of forest birds or with monkeys. In the guide area it occurs from eastern Honduras to Panama.
Voice
Groups give a loud, rolling chorus of repeated rising and falling whistled notes, chew-wee-o, chew-wee-o, that may go on for minutes. Also single harsh calls.
Recording: Juan Freile — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
24–29 cm. Mostly slate grey, darker and blackish on the head, throat and wings. A tuft of stiff white feathers on the forehead and chin around the base of the bill. The bill is bright coral red, fairly long and slightly curved. Tail long and blackish. Sexes alike.
Confusion species
No other bird in the guide area combines dark grey plumage with a red bill and white forehead. Groove-billed Ani Crotophaga sulcirostris and Greater Ani Crotophaga major also live in groups and are dark, but they are glossy black with a deep black bill.
Habitat
Interior and edges of humid lowland and foothill forest up to about 1200 m, also tall secondary forest. It sits in the middle and upper tree layers and catches large insects, spiders and small lizards, often flushed by mixed flocks or monkeys. It nests in a burrow in the ground, with young from earlier broods helping.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
Caribbean lowlands and foothills from eastern Honduras (Olancho and Gracias a Dios), Nicaragua and Costa Rica to western Panama; in central and eastern Panama on both slopes east to Darién. Outside the guide area from Colombia to Amazonia and eastern Brazil.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Groups are regularly seen in the Caribbean foothills of Costa Rica, for example at Arenal and La Selva, and along Pipeline Road (Camino del Oleoducto) in Panama. The loud chorus often gives a group away from far off.
Conservation status
Not threatened. It depends on closed forest and declines where forest becomes fragmented.
Scientific name
Monasa morphoeus | (Hahn & Küster, 1823)
Hahn & Küster described the species in 1823 as Bucco Morphoeus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Monasa was introduced in 1816 by Vieillot. Monasa comes from Greek monas 'solitary'. morphoeus probably refers to Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, fitting the sluggish-looking puffbirds. The specimen the first description was based on came from Brazil.