The white-breasted wood wren (''Henicorhina leucosticta'') is a small songbird of the

wren Wrens are a family of brown passerine birds in the predominantly New World family Troglodytidae. The family includes 88 species divided into 19 genera. Only the Eurasian wren occurs in the Old World, where, in Anglophone regions, it is commonly ...

family. It is a resident breeding species from central Mexico to northeastern Peru and

Suriname Suriname (; srn, Sranankondre or ), officially the Republic of Suriname ( nl, Republiek Suriname , srn, Ripolik fu Sranan), is a country on the northeastern Atlantic coast of South America. It is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the north ...

Description

The adult white-breasted wood wren is long and weighs . It has chestnut brown upperparts with a darker crown, pale

supercilia The supercilium is a plumage feature found on the heads of some bird species. It is a stripe which runs from the base of the bird's beak above its eye, finishing somewhere towards the rear of the bird's head.Dunn and Alderfer (2006), p. 10 Also ...

, and black-and-white streaked sides of the head and neck. The underparts are white becoming buff on the lower belly. The wings and very short tail are barred with black. Young birds have duller upperparts and grey underparts.

Call

The call of this species is a sharp ''cheek'' or explosive ''tuck'', and the song is ''cheer cheery weather'';

ornithologist Ornithology is a branch of zoology that concerns the "methodological study and consequent knowledge of birds with all that relates to them." Several aspects of ornithology differ from related disciplines, due partly to the high visibility and th ...

and bioacoustics expert

Luis Baptista Luis is a given name. It is the Spanish form of the originally Germanic name or . Other Iberian Romance languages have comparable forms: (with an accent mark on the i) in Portuguese and Galician, in Aragonese and Catalan, while is archaic ...

of the

California Academy of Sciences The California Academy of Sciences is a research institute and natural history museum in San Francisco, California, that is among the largest museums of natural history in the world, housing over 46 million specimens. The Academy began in 1853 ...

compared it to the opening bars of

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony The Symphony No. 5 in C minor of Ludwig van Beethoven, Op. 67, was written between 1804 and 1808. It is one of the best-known compositions in classical music and one of the most frequently played symphonies, and it is widely considered one of ...

. As with some other wrens, pairs often sing in

duets A duet is a musical composition or piece for two performers. Duets or The Duets may also refer to: Films and television * ''Duets'' (film), a 2000 film, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Giamatti and Huey Lewis * "Duets" (''Glee''), a 2010 episod ...

.Meyer de Schauensee, Rodolphe & William H. Phelps (1978) ''A Guide to the Birds of Venezuela'', Princeton University Press.

Habitat

''H. leucosticta'' breeds in lowlands and

foothills Foothills or piedmont are geographically defined as gradual increases in elevation at the base of a mountain range, higher hill range or an upland area. They are a transition zone between plains and low relief hills and the adjacent topograp ...

up to

above sea level Height above mean sea level is a measure of the vertical distance (height, elevation or altitude) of a location in reference to a historic mean sea level taken as a vertical datum. In geodesy, it is formalized as ''orthometric heights''. The comb ...

tropical wet forest Tropical and subtropical moist broadleaf forests (TSMF), also known as tropical moist forest, is a subtropical and tropical forest habitat type defined by the World Wide Fund for Nature. Description TSMF is generally found in large, discon ...

and adjacent tall

second growth The second (symbol: s) is the unit of time in the International System of Units (SI), historically defined as of a day – this factor derived from the division of the day first into 24 hours, then to 60 minutes and finally to 60 seconds each ...

. Its neat roofed nest is constructed on the ground or occasionally very low in undergrowth, and is concealed by dense vegetation. The eggs are incubated by the female alone for about two weeks to hatching, and the young

fledge Fledging is the stage in a flying animal's life between hatching or birth and becoming capable of flight. This term is most frequently applied to birds, but is also used for bats. For altricial birds, those that spend more time in vulnerable c ...

in about the same length of time again. This species may build a “ dormitory nest” for individuals or family groups, which is typically higher, than the breeding nest, up to off the ground. The white-breasted wood wren forages actively in low vegetation or on the ground in pairs in family groups. It mainly eats

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 ...

s and other

invertebrate Invertebrates are a paraphyletic group of animals that neither possess nor develop a vertebral column (commonly known as a ''backbone'' or ''spine''), derived from the notochord. This is a grouping including all animals apart from the chordate ...

References

General references: * Stiles, Gary and Alexander Skutch. 1990. ''A Guide to the Birds of Costa Rica''

Description

Call

Habitat

References

Further reading