The Ascent of Birds by John Reilly
Author:John Reilly
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Pelagic Publishing
Published: 2018-04-19T04:00:00+00:00
CHAPTER 16
The Sapayoa’s Story
ODD ONE OUT
Asoft musical trill emanates from deep within the nearby foliage, only to be followed by a long and frustrating silence. We are nevertheless excited, as this brief call indicates the presence of a Sapayoa, an elusive species restricted to the humid rainforests of southern Panama and western Colombia. Thankfully, the bird is quickly located, a uniformly olive manakin-like species, perched on a horizontal branch amid the forest’s lower canopy. Over the next few minutes, we watch keenly as the Sapayoa scans the surrounding leaves, sallies forth in pursuit of some unsuspecting insect and returns to its favoured vantage point. For the Sapayoa is the New World’s most enigmatic suboscine, a newly arrived interloper from distant shores, an evolutionary conundrum that bears the apposite epithet, Sapayoa aenigma (Plate 22). To fully appreciate its story, we need to return to Antarctica (western Gondwana) and follow the second wave of suboscine dispersal, one that would eventually give rise to the Old World suboscines (Figure 16.1).
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