Howdy, friends.  Our bird this week is as brightly colored as it is instructible.  The purple-breasted cotinga is native to Brazil, Colombia, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela.  It has a disjunct distribution, which means that its range is not contiguous and some populations live very far from others.  I couldn’t find a specific reason why, but that’s going to be the case for a lot of facts about this bird.  It may be habitat fragmentation due to human activity, or maybe there is some as-yet undiscovered aspect of these areas that make them ideal habitats.  This bird does not migrate, but there is some evidence that it moves locally as fruit becomes available throughout the year.

The purple-breasted cotinga prefers the edges and canopy of the rainforest, usually in areas with sandy soil.  Which is weird, because since it mostly eats fruit, you’d think soil with fewer nutrients would yield less and/or smaller fruit, but if the Cornell ornithology lab said so, I must take them at their word.  The bird eats mostly fruit, especially from palms and a local variant of mistletoe called parrot flower.  it occasionally joins mixed-species flocks while foraging in the forest’s canopy.  It has a similar beak to last week’s subject, small and pointy and designed to tear into fruit and seeds. The bird is very sexually dimorphic. Makes are blue and purple with black wingtips, females are gray and white with elaborate scalloping.

The purple-breasted cotinga is rated as of “least concern” by the IUCN.  Although little is known about it, it has a large range, which is thought to be a buffer against severe population decline.  It is estimated that around 6% of the forest cover in the cotinga’s range has been lost in the last decade.  The population is thought to be declining but relatively slowly.  It is estimated to have lost somewhere between 5-9% of its population in the last ten years.   In order to be reassessed as “near threatened,” it would need to lose 10% or more population in a year.  

Links: https://tinyurl.com/bds4cscm, https://tinyurl.com/65mm2dj3, https://tinyurl.com/2wsczuu9, https://tinyurl.com/3wks4w8b, https://tinyurl.com/mry8fu28, https://tinyurl.com/k7jyhfw7