The Science of Birds - Random Bird Thursday: A Mostly Motionless Bird with Walrus Tusks

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

In each Random Bird Thursday (RBT) episode, the idea is to highlight a bird species that probably isn't going to get featured in a full-length podcast episode. These are birds we might overlook, even though they deserve some appreciation and attention. SPOILER ALERT!The featured species in this episode is the White-whiskered Puffbird.Support the show

Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds. I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. And you know what day it is? It's Random Bird Thursday. Random Bird Thursday episodes are relatively short and unscripted. They each spotlight a bird species that I probably won't feature in a full-length episode.

With over 11,000 bird species in the world, Random Bird Thursday is a chance for us to celebrate a species we might otherwise overlook. So without further ado, let's push the Random Bird Selector button and see who we're talking about today. Okay, we have the white-whiskered puffbird, malacoptola penamensis. Now, before we learn about this bird, the white-whiskered puffbird, I just want to mention a couple ways that you can support the work I'm doing here with the science of birds, if you'd like to do that. The first way is by becoming a member of my Patreon community. There are now, hundreds of people in the Patreon community, and that's amazing. And their generous support

is what keeps this podcast going. And as a member, you not only provide support, but you also get some fun perks, things that the average person doesn't get. So if you're interested in that, then check out my Patreon page over at patreon.com slash science of birds. And then the other way you can support what I'm doing here is you can go to birdmerch.com, and that's where you can find T-shirts that I have designed related to birds and birding. And you can pick up yourself a shirt or 10 shirts to show off to all your friends how much you love birds, you love ornithology, birding, all of that stuff. So check that out again. That's birdmerch.com. Okay, let's kick off this random bird Thursday. We're talking about the white whiskered puffbird. Like all members of this

group, this family, the white whiskered puffbird is a stubert. stout bird, kind of chunky looking. And that's because it has kind of a full, fluffy plumage that gives it that stout look. So you can think of it's not related at all to the puffins, but that's kind of a similar idea, puffins being, you know, kind of pot-bellied puffy birds. So likewise with the puffbirds. So this one has a large head, a relatively short neck, a short narrow tail, and it's about seven inches long or 18 centimeters. The overall appearance is generally reddish brown, definitely darker

above, a little more buff colored below and streaky throughout the plumage. There are also some spots on the back. And we're talking about the white whiskered puffbird. So yes, there is a long, slender, kind of curved white mallor tuft coming down from the base of the bill. So kind of it looks like a drooping mustache, so that's where the bird gets its name. Or even can be described as like little miniature walrus tusks, which I really like that imagery. The bill is overall pretty blackish. It's dark, and the lower mandible is a little bit lighter. But this is a thick, slightly down-curved bill. You know, the overall effect of looking at this bird, if you're familiar with kingfishers, puffbirds kind of look like that. They have large heads, thick bills, that sort of thing. They're

closely related to Kingfishers, but the overall effect is similar. Now, unlike most puffbirds, males and females in the white-whiskered puffbird species actually have different plumages. So there's sexual dichromatism or dimorphism in this species. And if I were just to show you illustrations or pictures of a male and a female without labeling which is which, you might guess that the female is actually the male because when you look at them, my impression is that the female actually has the more boldly patterned plumage, the more kind of jazzy plumage. The male on the other hand has a little less contrast in his plumage. The male is much more rufous reddish brown, whereas the female has darker tones and a lighter belly and a darker back. So again,

more contrast in her plumage. Now, one of the things that sticks out to me when I look images of this bird is its red eyes. It has these really large red eyes that are really beautiful but also really striking. In terms of what these birds sound like, well, interestingly, these are among the most silent birds you'll find in a tropical forest in the Americas. And we're getting to the distribution in just a moment if you're wondering where these birds live. So they don't really have a very loud voice or they don't make complex songs. And apparently this species, the white whiskered puff bird, actually sings even less than many other puffbirds. So this species makes some high, thin, whistling sounds. The main one, I think the most common,

at least when I was looking for recordings of this bird, is this kind of descending, buzzy, or reedy sound that descends and fades away. And I'll go ahead and play you an example of that particular call. This one was recorded in Ecuador. So that's the most common call you would hear in the white-whiskered puff bird. And there are some other types of calls described as complaining notes or twittering, a plaintive note, most of which are kind of quiet and faint. Now, another sound this bird makes is actually a non-vocal sound, and that is the very loud clack that is made when the bird snaps its bill,

on a captured prey item, a small animal. Now, I haven't heard that myself. I actually haven't seen this bird yet. I don't know how often that bill clack actually happens. Like, is it every time that it catches something? I don't know, but that is definitely something that has been described for this species. So we've already said this is a relatively quiet bird, one of the most quiet in the neotropical forests.

In terms of behavior, what it does is it perches quietly and motionlessly for long periods in the shade of the forest, often kind of sitting there with its puffy feathers puffed up. And because it just kind of sits there motionlessly, interestingly, some early bird collectors, people that were encountering these birds, naturalists, or nithologists, their early descriptions of this species, they would say that this bird is kind of stupid or lethargic, or that it was apathetic. Because when those people would approach, the bird wouldn't really do much. And so they thought the bird was kind of stupid. And I think that's interesting because The last random bird Thursday episode I did, which was about the brown naughty,

the scientific name of that bird basically said that the bird was dumb, kind of for the same reason that the birds weren't overly concerned. They didn't react dramatically when humans approached. So here we have another bird that people are calling stupid because it doesn't react to all that much. Interesting. But of course, the white whiskered puffbird is, as far as we know, not stupid. It's just that that's its mode. That's its MO.

It just sits there quietly. paying attention to its surroundings. It has those big red eyes. It's very keen-sighted and perceptive. And it's depending on camouflage, right? It's using stealth rather than being an active hunter or forager. And we'll get to how it feeds pretty soon here. So remember that this bird has kind of a large head and those very large red eyes. And those large eyes allow the bird to collect a lot of light. So even though this is a diurnal bird, it can often be more more active later in the day, or as the evening is coming on, in the dusk, more active relative to many other diurnal birds. The white-whiskered puff bird might come out of the forest even

to forage in clearings in the dim light of either late afternoon or early morning or on wet and gloomy weather when there's not as much light. So this is very much a forest bird, but they sometimes come out into the open when the light is dim. These birds are seeing pretty much either you just see one or two. Very rarely you might see three of them. So these are not flocking birds. These are not very social birds. Now that said, and that's social among their own kind. Now, sometimes they will associate with mixed species flocks, other species of neotropical birds. But in general, regarding their own species, these are thought to be territorial birds, that a bonded pair, a mated pair will have its territory and will defend that territory from other

white-whiskered puffbirds. Okay, so now let's talk about the family and the distribution, habitat, all of that kind of stuff. So the white-whiskered puffbirds' scientific name is, again, malacoptola panamensis. Malacoptera loosely translates as soft wing. Members of this genus are often referred to as soft wings because of their loose plumage, right? The puffiness. Now, the second part of the scientific name, Panamens,

You can probably guess what that one means. That refers to Panama, which is the type locality where the first specimens were described by European ornithologists back in the mid-1800s. Okay, so malacoptola panamensis. This bird is in the family, buxanidae, B-U-C-C-O-N-I-D-A-E, B-U-C-C-O-N-I-D-A-E, and these are the puffbirds. And some of them are called nunlets or nunbirds, those are other names. There are about 37 species in this family, and they're all found in Central and South America.

And if you look at their silhouettes, their profiles, they all more or less have the same shape. They've got these big heads with pretty beefy bills, thick bills, and often with a little hook at the end of the upper mandible. So again, these kind of look like the kingfishers of the old world, kind of the forest kingfishers. So the family is buccanity, and the family that's most closely related to the kingfishers. these guys, the puffbirds, that would be the jacomars. The jacomars are in the family, Galbuladie. And together, the two families, Buxanidae and Galbulity make up the order galbular formies. That said, some modern taxonomies, bird taxonomies still place that

group, that lineage of the combination of puffbirds and jackamars. Some taxonomies consider those as being a suborder of the order, piciformis, which, includes woodpeckers and all those guys. Now, I still intend, hopefully, at some point, to do episodes on both of these families, to do a full episode on the puffbirds and another one on the jack-a-mars. So we're just kind of scratching the surface here at this higher-level taxonomy stuff. But yeah, maybe someday we'll get to those guys and look at the whole families, the entire families. So looking back to the genus Malacoptera, right, soft wing, there's seven other species,

or there's seven total species in that genus. And probably the closest relative to our bird today, our white-whiskered puffbird, the closest relative is probably the mustached puffbird and also the black streaked puffbird. And within the white-whiskered puff bird, there are four subspecies that have been recognized. And there's maybe some genetic evidence

that suggests the white-whiskered puff bird might actually represent a couple species. There's some genetic evidence to that effect. So who knows, someday this species we're talking about today might be split into two or more. All right, so I've hinted at where these birds live. The White Whiskered Puffbird is a New World species living in Central and South America.

They get as far north as southeastern Mexico and Chiapas and Tabasco. And then we find them on the Atlantic slope of Panama and down into Costa Rica, although interestingly it's absent from El Salvador. And then in terms of South America, we find this bird in Colombia, western Ecuador, and the extreme northwestern part of Peru. Its habitat is humid, evergreen forests and the shady edges of those forests. And usually you're going to find it within about 20 feet off the forest floor or roughly six meters.

It's a low elevation species. Its upper elevation limit is somewhere around a couple thousand feet in northern Central America. and a bit higher in Costa Rica and Colombia, maybe 3,000 feet. The white-whiskered puffbird is a resident bird, as far as we know. It does not migrate. It just hangs out in the same habitat year-round. Regarding conservation, I am happy to report that the white-whiskered puffbird is in the least concern category of the IUCN. As far as we know, the white-whiskered puff bird is doing okay, it has a broad distribution.

The population looks like it's stable. Now that said, there's always the caveat, which is that this is a forest-dwelling bird and neotropical forests all over the place are threatened with destruction, habitat destruction, right? From logging primarily. So it's not like this bird is immune from suffering at the hands of humans.

But one of the things that also allows it to be somewhat resilient is it seems like the white-whiskered puff bird is able to do pretty well in secondary forest growth, right? So after the original rainforest has been cut down, the forest that regrows, these guys can hang out in there and do maybe okay. All right. So what does a white-whiskered puffbird eat?

Well, they eat only small animals. They eat things like large orthopterins, which would be locusts and katydids and grasshoppers. They eat moths, other types of winged insects, big caterpillars, spiders, and also some vertebrates like lizards and maybe even some snakes. This is a sit-and-weight predator. The bird perches motionless on an exposed perch until it sees something to eat, which might be on some bark or a branch or on the ground.

Then the puffbird swoops down to capture the prey with its large bill and it makes that clack sound when the bill slams shut on the unfortunate prey animal. and then the food item is carried back to the original perch and devoured on the spot. Something like a lizard or a snake might get whacked against a branch a few times to knock it out and incapacitate it, much like we see with kingfishers. Now another interesting thing about the way the white whiskered puffbird forages is that there have been cases where this species has been documented following army ant swarms. That's not something I've talked about on the Science of Birds podcast.

yet, but I intend to do an entire episode about the phenomenon of birds that are associated with army ants. These massive swarms of ants move through the forest and all kinds of other small animals flee for their lives to get away from the army ants. So a lot of insects and other invertebrates, small vertebrates, they're all flushed by the army ants and then you have this whole suite of birds that have figured that out and those birds swoop in to pluck up the fleeing invertebrates or small vertebrates. And so the white whiskered puffbird is one of those birds that has that association. Well, a puffbird's life isn't just sitting around doing nothing or eating. At least eventually a white whiskered puffbird needs to make more puffbirds. So these

birds pair up. As far as we know, they are monogamous. And when it's time to make a nest, what these birds do is they actually make a burrow in the leaf litter on the forest floor. The tunnel has a little bit of a slope to it, maybe something like 30 degrees or less, and it's probably 18 to 22 inches long, or 46 to 56 centimeters, with just a small opening, maybe two or three inches or five to eight centimeters, and then a little ways into the tunnel, it kind of expands into a chamber. And the chamber is lined with large dead leaves, and that's where the eggs are deposited. The puffbirds camouflage the opening of their burrow by placing leaves and twigs around so that it's really not that obvious. And interestingly, ornithologists have noticed that there

really isn't a bunch of dirt around the entrance to the burrow like you might expect because these birds excavate the dirt. So because there's no dirt there, that suggests maybe the puffbirds are carrying away the excavated soil to further conceal the evidence of their burrow. Now, is that really happening? Who knows? It's just speculation, just a hypothesis. Both parents help take care of the eggs and the chicks. Both of them will incubate the eggs, and they have a bit of division of labor.

Within the first few days after hatching, the male is actually the only one that is brooding the nestlings, and he stays in the burrow almost constantly, while the mother brings all the food. And then at about six to eight days, the rolls reverse, and the male is the male. starts bringing the food when the chicks are no longer, it's no longer necessary to brood them during the day. But interestingly, the female will also bring some food and when ornithologists have recorded the number of times that the females return or that the males and females return to the nest, it turns out that the females do a lot more of the feeding than the male. So that's, yeah, kind of a complex situation there. It's very interesting. And I think a lot of this is just based on observation from just a few nests. You know, we don't know a ton about.

this bird. So hopefully with more observations, we'll learn more. Some of the things we still don't know is we don't know how long these birds live, for example, and we don't know about the dispersal of the young puffbirds as they're leaving their parents' territory. So lots more to learn about the white-whiskered puffbird. But that is what we have for today, for today's random bird Thursday. I hope you enjoyed it. I am recording this one also in Japan. I am still traveling. In any case, Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening. Thanks for being curious about the wonderful world of birds.

And I will talk to you in the next episode. Cheers.