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| One of the most perfect spots in South America is Rio Cristalino Lodge. In the heart of an almost untouched virgin rain-forest in the dead center of Amazonian Brazil, this incredible lodge has it all. Everything one could want in a Neotropical jungle is here: jaguars, tapirs, huge curassows, a black-water stream in which you can swim, and an abundance of birds and butterflies. Among the birds, none are more striking than the toucans and barbets that come to fruiting trees in the forest, and among those is Black-girdled Barbet (above). I find these two shots by Arthur Grosset so evocative of my own visit several years ago. The fruiting trees change with the seasons, but when one is found, oh the joy of watching what appears to eat the small but abundant fruits. Usually the views are of birds way up in the canopy, so these shots are particularly impressive. | ||||
 My
own photographic efforts in Neotropical forests have been limited and rather
poor. I have this somewhat distant shot of a male Red-headed Barbet
(right) at its nest tree; he and his mate were excavating and enlarging
a hole in this dead tree in western Ecuador. This species is very sexually
dimorphic, and the female is much less colorful than the male. Like other
barbets in the tropics around the world the American Barbets excavate holes
in which they lay eggs. They also have zygodactyl feet (two toes forward,
two backwards) for clinging to trees (Short & Horne 2001).
Barbets are found in tropical forests around the globe. Recent molecular evidence has proven that New World barbets, toucans, and these two birds in Semnornis (e.g., the toucan-barbets) are more closely related to each other than they are to Old World barbets (Burton 1984, Prum 1988, Sibley and Ahlquist 1990, Lanyon & Hall 1994, Barker & Lanyon 2000, Johansson et al. 2001, Johansson & Ericson 2003, Moyle 2004). Given the evidence that toucans are actually 'big-billed New World barbets' when compared to barbets in the Old World, there are several different taxonomic approaches. The Handbook of the Birds of the World (Short & Horne 2002) sticks with the traditional approach of two families: all the barbets (including the toucan-barbets) in a barbet family and the toucans in a toucan family. They argue that it is easy to tell whether any bird in the group is a barbet or a toucan, and that the barbets are ecological counterparts on each of the three major tropical continents. This is true enough, but it is a bit like sticking your head in the ground to avoid the new evidence of relationships. I prefer a more modern approach, now adopted by the South American Checklist Committee. They treat the two groups of Old Word barbets as two separate families, Asian Barbets [Megalaimidae] and African Barbets [Lybiidae], and then separate the three New World groups into separate families as well: New World Barbets [Capitonidae], Toucan-Barbets [Semnornithidae] and Toucans [Ramphastidae]. You can reach my pages on each of these families as follows:
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 A
number of American barbets are scare and local, or little-known. When I
was just getting into birding, an important mentor to me was then graduate
student at U.C. Berkeley J. Van Remsen (now Head of Ornithology at Louisiana
State University and an important member of many professional committees,
including the A.O.U. Checklist committee). Van was then young, enthusiastic,
and I thought he was brilliant. For a Ph.D. thesis he chose field work
on the Amazon River at Leticia, Colombia. When Van came back to the Bay
Area after his first field season (circa 1974, a time when there were very
few field guides to South America) I asked Van what was the most spectacular
bird he had encountered in the Amazon Basin rainforest that was not pictured
in any field guide. His answer, after some thought, was the Lemon-throated
Barbet.
I went with a group led by Van to Colombia in 1975 and saw the Lemon-throated Barbet (left in a photo from that trip by John Luther). Today, of course, you can find great field guide art of this species in several places, including the Guy Tudor painting in Hilty & Brown's (1986) Colombia field guide. But back then the barbet was an astonishing package of bright yellow, deep scarlet, deep black and rich green hopping in the canopy of the dense jungle. What a treat! Interestingly enough, in more recent years Van Remsen and some of his students studied the stomach contents of ten species of New World barbets, plus toucans, trogons, and motmots (Remsen et al. 1993). The predominant condition for most species of American barbet was that the stomach contents were fruit only, although these barbets eat a lot more arthropods than related species (e.g., both toucans and toucan-barbets eat more fruit than do New World barbets). One species, however, bucked the trend and had more vertebrate and arthropod matter in its stomach than fruit. It was — you guessed it — Lemon-throated Barbet. |
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 Even
more incredible was the very recent (1996) discovery of a truly spectacular
barbet, previously unknown to science, in the Andes of eastern Peru. It
has just been described as the Scarlet-banded Barbet Capito wallacei
(O'Neill et al. 2000; the painting shown at right graced the cover of The
Auk). Crisply arrayed in striking patterns of deep scarlet, bright
yellow, forest green, black and white, it may be the most impressive barbet
of them all. It is currently known only from the cloud forest at 1450m
(4750') on one mountain near the headwaters of the Rio Cushabatay, Peru.
There have been follow-up birding expeditions that have refound it, but
not without difficulties of near-biblical proportions!
I list it among my "top 50" best
birds in the world, but I strongly suspect I'll never make it to the
remote location to try for this one.
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| Photos: Arthur Grosset photographed the
Black-girdled
Barbet Capito dayi at a fruiting tree in the
canopy at Rio Cristalino Lodge, Brazil, in 2003. The Red-headed
Barbet Eubucco bourcierii
was at the Rio Palenque reserve,
Ecuador, 4 Oct 1989. The
Lemon-throated Barbet Eubucco
richardsoni was photographed 20 July 1975 at Pobre Allegre, on the
Javarí River, Peru, by John S. Luther. Daniel Lane painted the Scarlet-banded
Barbet Capito wallacei; from the cover of The Auk,
vol. 117, no. 3 (July 2000) .
Photos © Arthur Grosset,
Don Roberson, and John S. Luther, as credited, used with permission, all
rights reserved.
Many more excellent Arthur Grosset photos are on his web page; he particularly features South America. Use this link to Rio Cristalino Lodge for information on this fabulous place. Family Book: Rating: I must confess that I don't actually own this book, nor have I done more that quickly glance through it in a bookstore. But every one of the Oxford Univ. Press series on bird families has been excellent, and this looks equally solid. I presume that the "meat" of this book has been summarized by the same authors in their Handbook of the Birds of the World series (Short & Horne 2002) which I do own and have studied.Literature cited: American Ornithologists' Union. 1998. Check-List of North American Birds. 7th ed. A.O.U., Washington, D.C. |
A barbet page was created 20 Mar 1999; signficantly revised 23 June 2001, and this page redesigned 28 Sep 2004
