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White-winged Becard | Pachyramphus polychopterus
Witvleugelbekarde | Cabezón aliblanco
The White-winged Becard is a small Pachyramphus becard of forest edges and semi-open country. The male is black and grey with a striking amount of white in the wing; the female is olive-brown and yellowish with cinnamon wing edgings. In the guide area it lives from Belize and Guatemala to Panama.
Voice
A series of soft, rather melancholy whistled notes, often one or two slower notes followed by a quicker series.
Recording: Nick Talbot — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
14–15 cm. Stocky, with a fairly large head and a short, broad bill. Male with a glossy black crown and back, grey rump and grey underparts; scapulars white and wing coverts and tertials broadly edged white, so the closed wing shows much white. Tail black with white tips. Female olive-brown above with a browner crown and a broken pale eye-ring, yellowish white to pale yellow below; wing coverts and tertials broadly edged cinnamon, tail tips buff.
Confusion species
The male Black-and-white Becard Pachyramphus albogriseus (highlands of Costa Rica and western Panama) has a grey back and a white stripe above the eye; the female has a chestnut crown bordered black. The male Cinereous Becard Pachyramphus rufus (Panama) is paler grey above and almost white below, with less white in the wing. Barred Becard Pachyramphus versicolor lives in the mountains and has finely barred underparts.
Habitat
Forest edges, second growth, riverine forest, clearings with trees, plantations and pasture with scattered trees, mainly in the lowlands and foothills up to about 1500 m. It eats insects and fruit, often picked from foliage in flight. It builds a large, globular nest with a side entrance high in a tree.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
From Belize and Guatemala (scarce in the north) through Honduras and Nicaragua to Costa Rica and Panama, mainly on the Caribbean slope and in the south also on the Pacific slope. Outside the guide area widespread in South America to northern Argentina.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Often seen along forest edges and in clearings at La Selva in Costa Rica and in the Panama Canal area. The male's white wing pattern stands out when it perches upright on a bare branch.
Conservation status
Not threatened. Widespread and common in semi-open, man-modified landscapes.
Scientific name
Pachyramphus polychopterus | (Vieillot, 1818)
Vieillot described the species in 1818 as Platyrhynchos polychopterus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Pachyramphus was introduced in 1840 by Gray. Pachyramphus is Greek, from pakhus 'thick' and rhamphos 'bill', after the stout, broad bill. polychopterus is Greek, probably from polus 'many' and -pteros 'winged', after the many white edgings on the wing; the exact formation is unclear. The specimen the first description was based on came from Bahia, Brazil.