Chestnut-belted Gnateater

About the Chestnut-belted Gnateater

The chestnut-belted gnateater (Conopophaga aurita) is a species of bird in the family Conopophagidae, the gnateaters. It is found in the Amazon Basin of northern Brazil, southern Colombia and eastern Peru and Ecuador; also the Guianan countries of Guyana, Suriname and eastern French Guiana.

Its natural habitat is tropical moist lowland forest. The chestnut-belted gnateater was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with the thrushes in the genus Turdus and coined the binomial name Turdus auritus. Gmelin based his description on "Le fourmilier à oreilles blanches" that had been described and illustrated in 1778 by French polymath Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. Buffon had access to both male and female specimens that had been collected in Cayenne. The chestnut-belted gnateater is now placed with eight other gnateaters in the genus Conopophaga that was introduced in 1816 by the French ornithologist Louis Pierre Vieillot. It is the type species of the genus. The genus name combines the Ancient Greek kōnōps meaning "gnat" with -phagos... Wikipedia →