Howdy, friends. Our bird this week is another cotinga, the pompadour cotinga.  It is named after a French noblewoman whose favorite color was purple, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, aka Madam Pompadour.  The pompadour cotinga lives in large sections of South America, including in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela Guyana and French Guiana.  Some vagrants have been seen in Bolivia and Ecuador.  

These cotingas live in the canopy layer of the rainforest, and some live in a kind of forest new to your humble host.  Pompadour cotingas, in some of their range, live in varillal or white sand forests.  These are forests which grow on and are limited to ancient sand dunes.  Although this unique and rare biome needs more study, the current thinking is that these dunes were once coastal, and now find themselves far from any sea as water levels shift and tectonic plates move.  The sand is especially white because as plant life leaches out any available nutrients, the sand becomes acidic and bleaches.  Bleached beach.  Anyway.

Like other cotingas, the pompadour cotinga is highly sexually dimorphic.  The males are a bit of a wine color with white wings, while the females are more of a speckled gray.  The male’s coloration was at first thought to come from red carotenoids and blue structural color, but researchers have confirmed that the bird does not use any structural colors, instead combining eight different carotenoids of which six are unique to this species.  Like other cotingas, they have a short beak that is suited to their diet of mostly fruit.  They forage in small groups and are thought to occasionally eat insects and other animals when given the opportunity, especially during breeding season when caloric needs are high.  

During breeding season, for which there does not appear to be an agreed upon time of year, males compete by congregating where they see a female building a nest.  They will perform a ritualized chase and try to dislodge a rival male from his perch, replacing him in the local hierarchy.  While doing this they flash their bright white underwings where the female can see.  Pompadour cotingas don’t hag out together for long, and the male will abandon the female once she lays her single egg.  In the single case observed, the mother fed the chick berries and ate its feces, presumably to keep the nest free of any parasites that would otherwise seek to eat the chick’s leavings.

The pompadour cotinga is rated as of “least concern” by the IUCN.  It has a large range, and although the population is thought to be dropping, it is not changing quickly enough to merit reassessment.  However, it is vulnerbable to habitat loss, and the most recent data I could find estimate that it has lost between about 12-13% of suitable habitat in ten years.  Should this continue, it is estimated that the bird could lose as much as 25% of its population in a ten year period. 

Have a good weekend, everyone.  Be sure to practice self-care and also mod-care.

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