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Male Dot-winged antwren, Inírida, Colombia
Enter the confusing world of antwrens, in particular the males are a source of confusion and misinformation, many sharing this black appearance with white highlights. Judged by the de facto standard book "Birds of Colombia", this can't be a dot-winged antwren, as the male's eye is illustrated as red (on this photo it is black), and the distribution does not match. Still it very likely is a dot-winged antwren, based on the length and marking on the tail, but even more important: the distinct appearance of the female, which I found only metres away:
Lesson learned is that even though that book is a standard work, it cannot be trusted entirely. Local guides know this and regularly criticize the poor and misleading illustrations in the book. Not to bash the book though, it's no small effort to document the 2,000 birds of Colombia. Closeup:
The dot-winged antwren is a passerine bird in the antbird family. It is a resident in tropical Central and South America from southeastern Mexico south to western Ecuador, northern Bolivia, central Brazil and the Guianas. It is the only member of the genus "Microrhopias".
comments (2)
I still deeply respect the experts behind the book though. Colombia has the most birds of any country. It's not a deeply explored country. It has very difficult terrain. Nobody else has even attempted to document and illustrate them all. They need to squeeze many thousands of tiny illustrations in a single book (2000 birds, each showing a male, female, sometimes juvenile illustrations). There's entire families of almost identical looking birds, with only tiny variations. And this doesn't even include the extra complication of sub species, which are out of scope for the book. Distribution information is outdated the moment they write it down, as new observations keep coming in that change everything.
All in all, it's still an invaluable book, and each new edition gets better. So in general I see the problem opposite: the most accurate information usually is in books, yet this information hasn't yet made it online. Not just books. The same is true for the collections of natural history museums. Locked up in the physical world, not available online.
Good thing there's a site to change that, even if it is in small ways ;) Posted 8 years ago