East Amazonian Fire-eye

About the East Amazonian Fire-eye

The East Amazonian fire-eye (Pyriglena leuconota) is an insectivorous bird in subfamily Thamnophilinae of family Thamnophilidae, the "typical antbirds". It is endemic to Brazil. The East Amazonian fire-eye was described and illustrated by the German naturalist Johann Baptist von Spix in 1824 and given the binomial name Myothera leuconota. The current genus Pyriglena was introduced by the German ornithologist Jean Cabanis in 1847.

The East Amazonian fire-eye's taxonomy remains unsettled. The International Ornithological Congress, the Clements taxonomy, and the South American Classification Committee of the American Ornithological Society treat it as a species with these three subspecies:

P. l. interposita Pinto, 1947 P. l. leuconota (Spix, 1824) P. l. pernambucensis Zimmer, 1931 However, BirdLife International's Handbook of the Birds of the World (HBW) treats the three taxa as subspecies of what it calls the white-backed fire-eye, with the binomial Pyriglena leuconota sensu lato. Starting in 2020 the other three systems split the white-backed into the East Amazonian, Tapajos, and western fire-eyes.

The Tapajos fire-eye is 16 to 18 cm... Wikipedia →