Tumbes Pewee

About the Tumbes Pewee

The Tumbes pewee or western tropical pewee (Contopus punensis) is a passerine bird in the family Tyrannidae, the tyrant flycatchers. It is found in Ecuador and Peru. The tumbes pewee's taxonomy is unsettled. The International Ornithological Committee (IOC), the Clements taxonomy, and BirdLife International's Handbook of the Birds of the World (HBW) treat it as a full species, though HBW calls it the "western tropical pewee". The North and South American Classification Committees of the American Ornithological Society treat it and seven other taxa as subspecies of the tropical pewee with the binomial Contopus cinereus. In 2016 HBW separated three of them as the monotypic "western tropical pewee" and the two-subspecies southern tropical pewee (C. cinereus). In 2018 the IOC recognized C. punensis as the tumbes pewee and Clements followed suit in 2022.

The tumbes pewee is 13 to 14 cm (5.1 to 5.5 in) long; three females weighed an average of 9.3 g (0.33 oz). The sexes have the same plumage. Adults have a dark olive-gray crown with a slight crest, white to grayish white lores, and a thin white eye-ring on an otherwise pale grayish olive face... Wikipedia →