Blue-crowned Trogon

About the Blue-crowned Trogon

The blue-crowned trogon (Trogon curucui) is a species of bird in the family Trogonidae, the quetzals and trogons. It is found in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Peru. As with all trogons, this species is sexually dimorphic. The male has a blue head with an orange orbital ring, a red belly with a narrow white breastband and a green back. The female differs in having a grey head, a grey back and a broken white eye-ring.

The blue-crowned trogon was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1766 in the twelfth edition of his Systema Naturae. He placed it with the other trogons in the genus Trogon and coined the binomial name Trogon curucui. Linnaeus based his description on the "Curucui" that had been described and illustrated in 1648 by the German naturalist Georg Marcgrave in his book Historia Naturalis Brasiliae. The name "Curucui" and the specific epithet are derived from Surucui, a word from the extinct Brazilian Tupi language for a small bird. A 2008 molecular phylogenetic study of the genus Trogon found that the blue-crowned trogon was sister to the yellow-bellied Guianan trogon (T. violaceus).

Three subspecies are recognised... Wikipedia →