Stiles's tapaculo (''Scytalopus stilesi'') is a member of the

tapaculo The tapaculos or tapacolos are a family, Rhinocryptidae, of small suboscine passerine birds, found mainly in South America and with the highest diversity in the Andean regions. Three species ( Chocó, Tacarcuna, and the silvery-fronted) are ...

s, a group of

Neotropical The Neotropical realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms constituting Earth's land surface. Physically, it includes the tropical terrestrial ecoregions of the Americas and the entire South American temperate zone. Definition In bioge ...

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 lightweigh ...

s. It was described as new to science in 2005. It has been found at 21 sites in montane forest between 1,420 and 2,130 m altitude in the northern Cordillera Central of the

Colombia Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...

n Andes; although having a restricted range, within this limited area it is a common understorey bird. Initially, it seemed as if the species would classify as near threatened (Cuervo ''et al.'' 2005), but it turned out to be more plentiful and thus is classified as species of least concern in the 2007 IUCN Red List. The species was originally observed in the 1990s, but when Niels Krabbe examined recordings of their songs, his suspicions arose that they were a new species - Stiles's tapaculo's song is considerably faster and lower-pitched than that of the closely related Ecuadorian tapaculo ''S. robbinsi'' (Cuervo ''et al.'' 2005). The species was named in honour of Frank Gary Stiles, an ornithologist who played a prominent role in research into Neotropical birds in the 1980s and 1990s.

References

*Cuervo, Andrés M.; Cadena, Carlos Daniel; Krabbe, Niels & Renjifo, Luis Miguel (2005): ''Scytalopus stilesi'', a new species of tapaculo (Rhinocryptidae) from the Cordillera Central of Colombia. ''Auk (journal), Auk'' 122(2): 445–463. [English with Spanish abstract] Digital Object Identifier, DOI:10.1642/0004-8038(2005)122[0445:SSANSO]2.0.CO;2PDF fulltext
Retrieved on 22 May 2007. Scytalopus, Stiles's tapaculo Birds of the Colombian Andes Endemic birds of Colombia Birds described in 2005, Stiles's tapaculo Taxa named by Niels Krabbe, Stiles's tapaculo {{Rhinocryptidae-stub