Slaty Flowerpiercer
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Slaty Flowerpiercer
The slaty flowerpiercer (''Diglossa plumbea'') is a passerine bird endemic to the Talamancan montane forests. This is a common bird in mountain forest canopy and edges, and especially in sunlit clearings and areas with flowering shrubs, which can include gardens. The lower altitudinal limit of its breeding range increases from 1200 m in the north of Costa Rica to 1900 m in the southern mountains. It is found well above the timberline in páramo habitat. The large cup nest, built by the female, is made of coarse plant material and lined with fine fibres. It is placed 0.4 to 4 m up in a dense shrub, grass tussock or pine. The clutch is two brown-speckled pale blue eggs, which are incubated by the female alone for 12–14 days to hatching. The slaty flowerpiercer has an upturned bill with a hooked upper mandible and pointed lower mandible. It is 10 cm long and weighs 9 g. The adult male is blue-grey with a lead-grey throat and breast. The tail and wings are blackish with ...
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Jean Cabanis
Jean Louis Cabanis (8 March 1816 – 20 February 1906) was a German ornithologist. Cabanis was born in Berlin to an old Huguenot family who had moved from France. Little is known of his early life. He studied at the University of Berlin from 1835 to 1839, and then travelled to North America, returning in 1841 with a large natural history collection. He was assistant and later director of the Natural History Museum of Berlin (which was at the time the Berlin University Museum), taking over from Martin Lichtenstein. He founded the ''Journal für Ornithologie'' in 1853, editing it for the next forty-one years, when he was succeeded by his son-in-law Anton Reichenow. He died in Friedrichshagen. A number of birds are named after him, including Cabanis's bunting ''Emberiza cabanisi'', Cabanis's spinetail ''Synallaxis cabanisi'', Azure-rumped tanager The azure-rumped tanager or Cabanis's tanager (''Poecilostreptus cabanisi'') is a species of bird in the family Thraupidae. It ...
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Passerine
A passerine () is any bird of the order Passeriformes (; from Latin 'sparrow' and '-shaped'), which includes more than half of all bird species. Sometimes known as perching birds, passerines are distinguished from other orders of birds by the arrangement of their toes (three pointing forward and one back), which facilitates perching. With more than 140 families and some 6,500 identified species, Passeriformes is the largest clade of birds and among the most diverse clades of terrestrial vertebrates, representing 60% of birds.Ericson, P.G.P. et al. (2003Evolution, biogeography, and patterns of diversification in passerine birds ''J. Avian Biol'', 34:3–15.Selvatti, A.P. et al. (2015"A Paleogene origin for crown passerines and the diversification of the Oscines in the New World" ''Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution'', 88:1–15. Passerines are divided into three clades: Acanthisitti (New Zealand wrens), Tyranni (suboscines), and Passeri (oscines or songbirds). The passeri ...
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Bird
Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweight skeleton. Birds live worldwide and range in size from the bee hummingbird to the ostrich. There are about ten thousand living species, more than half of which are passerine, or "perching" birds. Birds have whose development varies according to species; the only known groups without wings are the extinct moa and elephant birds. Wings, which are modified forelimbs, gave birds the ability to fly, although further evolution has led to the loss of flight in some birds, including ratites, penguins, and diverse endemic island species. The digestive and respiratory systems of birds are also uniquely adapted for flight. Some bird species of aquatic environments, particularly seabirds and some waterbirds, have further evolved for swimming. B ...
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Talamancan Montane Forests
The Talamancan montane forests ecoregion, in the tropical moist broadleaf forest biome, are in montane Costa Rica and western Panama in Central America. Setting The Talamancan montane forests cover a discontinuous area of in Cordilleran mountains, including the Cordillera de Guanacaste, Cordillera de Tilarán, Cordillera Central, and Cordillera de Talamanca, from northwestern Costa Rica to western Panama, with outliers on Cerro Hoya on Panama's Azuero Peninsula. The montane forests lie above 750 to 1500 meters elevation, up to approximately 3000 meters elevation, where they transition to the grasslands and shrublands of the Costa Rican páramo on the highest peaks. The montane forests are surrounded at lower elevations by lowland forests, including the Isthmian-Atlantic moist forests on the Atlantic (Caribbean) slope, the Isthmian-Pacific moist forests to the south on the Pacific slope, and the Costa Rican seasonal moist forests to the northwest. Flora The forests are made u ...
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Páramo
Páramo () can refer to a variety of alpine tundra ecosystems located in the Andes Mountain Range, South America. Some ecologists describe the páramo broadly as "all high, tropical, montane vegetation above the continuous timberline". A narrower term classifies the páramo according to its regional placement in the northern Andes of South America and adjacent southern Central America. The páramo is the ecosystem of the regions above the continuous forest line, yet below the permanent snowline. It is a "Neotropical high mountain biome with a vegetation composed mainly of giant rosette plants, shrubs and grasses". According to scientists, páramos may be "evolutionary hot spots", that meaning that it's among the fastest evolving regions on Earth. Location The Northern Andean Páramo global ecoregion includes the Cordillera Central páramo (Ecuador, Peru), Santa Marta páramo (Colombia), Cordillera de Merida páramo (Venezuela) and Northern Andean páramo (Colombia, Ecuador) ter ...
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Epiphyte
An epiphyte is an organism that grows on the surface of a plant and derives its moisture and nutrients from the air, rain, water (in marine environments) or from debris accumulating around it. The plants on which epiphytes grow are called phorophytes. Epiphytes take part in nutrient cycles and add to both the diversity and biomass of the ecosystem in which they occur, like any other organism. They are an important source of food for many species. Typically, the older parts of a plant will have more epiphytes growing on them. Epiphytes differ from parasites in that they grow on other plants for physical support and do not necessarily affect the host negatively. An organism that grows on another organism that is not a plant may be called an epibiont. Epiphytes are usually found in the temperate zone (e.g., many mosses, liverworts, lichens, and algae) or in the tropics (e.g., many ferns, cacti, orchids, and bromeliads). Epiphyte species make good houseplants due to their minimal wat ...
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Insect
Insects (from Latin ') are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body ( head, thorax and abdomen), three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes and one pair of antennae. Their blood is not totally contained in vessels; some circulates in an open cavity known as the haemocoel. Insects are the most diverse group of animals; they include more than a million described species and represent more than half of all known living organisms. The total number of extant species is estimated at between six and ten million; In: potentially over 90% of the animal life forms on Earth are insects. Insects may be found in nearly all environments, although only a small number of species reside in the oceans, which are dominated by another arthropod group, crustaceans, which recent research has indicated insects are nested within. Nearly all insects hatch from eggs. ...
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Hummingbird
Hummingbirds are birds native to the Americas and comprise the biological family Trochilidae. With about 361 species and 113 genera, they occur from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, but the vast majority of the species are found in the tropics around the equator. They are small birds, with most species measuring in length. The smallest extant hummingbird species is the bee hummingbird, which weighs less than . The largest hummingbird species is the giant hummingbird, weighing . They are specialized for feeding on flower nectar, but all species also consume flying insects or spiders. Hummingbirds split from their sister group, the swifts and treeswifts, around 42 million years ago. The common ancestor of extant hummingbirds is estimated to have lived 22 million years ago in South America. They are known as hummingbirds because of the humming sound created by their beating wings, which flap at high frequencies audible to humans. They hover in mid-air at rapid wing-flapping rate ...
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Bananaquit
The bananaquit (''Coereba flaveola'') is a species of passerine bird in the tanager family Thraupidae. Before the development of molecular genetics in the 21st century, its relationship to other species was uncertain and it was either placed with the buntings and New World sparrows in the family Emberizidae, with New World warblers in the family Parulidae or in its own monotypic family Coerebidae. This small, active nectarivore is found in warmer parts of the Americas, and is generally common. Taxonomy The bananaquit was formally described by Carl Linnaeus in his landmark 1758 10th edition of ''Systema Naturae'' as ''Certhia flaveola''. Linnaeus based his description on the "black and yellow bird" described by John Ray and Hans Sloane, and the "Black and Yellow Creeper" described and illustrated by George Edwards in 1751. The bananaquit was reclassified as the only member of the genus ''Coereba'' by Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot in 1809. The genus name is of uncertain origin bu ...
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Honeycreeper
The typical honeycreepers form a genus ''Cyanerpes'' of small birds in the tanager family Thraupidae. They are found in the tropical New World from Mexico south to Brazil. They occur in the forest canopy, and, as the name implies, they are specialist nectar feeders with long curved bills. The four ''Cyanerpes'' species have colourful legs, long wings and a short tail. The males are typically glossy purple-blue and the females greenish. Taxonomy and species list The genus ''Cyanerpes'' was introduced in 1899 by the American ornithologist Harry C. Oberholser with the red-legged honeycreeper as the type species. The name combines the Ancient Greek ''kuanos'' meaning "dark-blue" and ''herpēs'' meaning "creeper". There are two other tanagers with honeycreeper in their common name: the green honeycreeper in the monospecific genus ''Chlorophanes'' and the golden-collared honeycreeper in the monospecific genus ''Iridophanes''. These two species are sister taxa and belong to the subf ...
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Cinnamon-bellied Flowerpiercer
The cinnamon-bellied flowerpiercer (''Diglossa baritula'') is a species of bird in the family Thraupidae. It is found in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist montane forests and heavily degraded former forest. It is a species known to be a nectar robber, apparently taking nectar while not pollinating Pollination is the transfer of pollen from an anther of a plant to the stigma of a plant, later enabling fertilisation and the production of seeds, most often by an animal or by wind. Pollinating agents can be animals such as insects, birds, a ... the plant. References cinnamon-bellied flowerpiercer Birds of Mexico Birds of Guatemala Birds of Honduras cinnamon-bellied flowerpiercer Taxonomy articles created by Polbot {{Thraupidae-stub ...
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Diglossa (bird)
''Diglossa'' is a genus in the family Thraupidae. They are commonly known as flowerpiercers because of their habit of piercing the base of flowers to access nectar that otherwise would be out of reach. This is done with their highly modified bill, which is typically upswept, with a hook at the tip. Most members of the genus ''Diglossa'' are found in highlands of South America (especially the Andes), but two species are found in Central America. Taxonomy and species list The genus ''Diglossa'' was introduced by the German naturalist Johann Georg Wagler in 1832 with the cinnamon-bellied flowerpiercer (''Diglossa baritula'') as the type species. The genus name is from the Ancient Greek ''diglōssos'' meaning "double-tongued" or "speaking two languages". The genus now includes 18 species. * Golden-eyed flowerpiercer, ''Diglossa glauca'' * Bluish flowerpiercer, ''Diglossa caerulescens'' * Masked flowerpiercer, ''Diglossa cyanea'' * Indigo flowerpiercer, ''Diglossa indigotica'' * ...
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