Crowned Chat Tyrant

About the Crowned Chat Tyrant

The crowned chat-tyrant (Silvicultrix frontalis) is a species of bird in the family Tyrannidae, the tyrant flycatchers. It is found in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. The crowned chat-tyrant was formally described in 1847 by Frédéric de Lafresnaye as Tyrannula frontalis. In 1966 Meyer de Schauensee placed it in genus Ochthoeca. Wesley Lanyon moved it to Silvicultrix when he erected that genus in 1986. The IOC adopted the change in 2009. BirdLife International's Handbook of the Birds of the World (HBW) adopted the change in 2016, the Clements taxonomy in 2022, and the South American Classification Committee of the American Ornithological Society (SACC) in 2023.

The crowned chat-tyrant's further taxonomy is unsettled. The IOC assigns it two subspecies, the nominate S. f. frontalis (Lafresnaye, 1847) and S. f. albidiadema (Lafresnaye, 1848). The SACC, Clements, and HBW include two more, S. f. spondionota and S. f. boliviana, that the IOC treats as the separate species Kalinowski's chat-tyrant (S. spodionota). Clements does separate the two pairs within its one species as "crowned chat-tyrant (crowned)" and "crowned chat-tyrant (Kalinowski's)". Wikipedia →