Epaulet Oriole

About the Epaulet Oriole

The epaulet oriole (Icterus cayanensis) is a species of bird in the family Icteridae, the oropendolas, New World orioles, and New World blackbirds. It is found in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, Trinidad, and Venezuela.

The epaulet oriole was formally described in 1766 with the binomial Oriolus cayanensis. Since then it has a complicated taxonomic history. For much of the twentieth century some authors considered it and the moriche oriole (I. chrysocephalus) to be individual monotypic species. Other authors treated chrysocephalus as a subspecies of I. cayanensis. In the twenty-first century most taxonomic systems have adopted the latter position. However, as of late 2025 BirdLife International's Handbook of the Birds of the World (HBW) retains the two taxa as separate species. The Clements taxonomy recognizes some distinctions within the species, calling I. c. cayanensis the "epaulet oriole (epaulet)" and I. c. chrysocephalus the "epaulet oriole (moriche)".

In the mid-twentieth century one author placed the epaulet oriole and the orchard oriole (I. spurius) in a separate genus Bananivorus but later work showed... Wikipedia →