White-winged Becard

Overview

A small canopy bird about 15 cm long with strong sexual dimorphism. The male is glossy black above with a contrasting pale gray rump, two bold white wing patches, and white-edged tertials; the underparts are pale gray. The female is olive-brown above with rufous edges to the wing feathers and a yellowish wash on the belly, easily confused with several other small flycatchers and becards until you see the wing pattern.

Pairs stay together year-round and forage by perching, scanning, then making short sallies to glean insects from leaves and small branches. They sometimes take small berries. The English name records the conspicuous white wing patches of the male, which flash in flight.

Why Tortuguero

White-winged Becard is a canopy bird of the lowland Caribbean slope, so the tall gallery forest along Tortuguero’s canals and the second growth around the village suit it well. It is not a deep-forest specialist — like several Tityridae in the region, it tolerates edge habitat and is one of the few becards you have a realistic chance of seeing from a canoe with binoculars trained on the upper branches.

How to see them (honestly)

• Most easily found at dawn when the male calls from a high exposed branch.
• Scan the tops of large gallery-forest trees along the main canals from a slow-moving boat.
• Look for the male’s white wing flashes when he changes perches.
• Often loosely associated with mixed-species flocks but rarely buried in the center of one.

Status note

IUCN lists White-winged Becard as Least Concern with a stable population. It uses second growth and gallery forest well enough that it persists in landscapes where deeper-forest cotingas and tityras have declined. In Tortuguero its habitat is well represented in both the strict reserve and the surrounding buffer, and there is no immediate concern for the local population.