Cock-of-the-rock!!
The orangest of the cotingas
(Listen to the radio version here.)
When I was a teacher back in the 1970s, one of my fourth graders became obsessed with the cock-of-the-rock after writing a report for science class. Before our class visited the University of Wisconsin Zoology Museum on field trips, I always asked the curator to put out specimens of birds we’d talked about in class. This time he set out a couple of cocks-of-the-rock, and even let the little boy touch one—he was thrilled! I noticed a magazine with a cover story about cocks-of-the-rock in a bookstore so I bought a copy for him; you’d have thought I’d given him the Hope Diamond.
Cocks-of-the-rock are unmistakable, not only for their bright orange or scarlet colors but their unique crest, formed by two rows of fluffy, forward-facing feathers meeting along the midline to form that semicircular casque which almost entirely covers the bill, giving cocks-of-the-rocks their bizarrely unbirdlike aspect.
Back when my student took such a liking to them, my life list had barely reached 300. Both my ornithology classes pretty thoroughly covered the orders and families of birds found in the United States and Canada—so many I’d never heard of before, and learning them all was overwhelming. The very idea of traveling beyond that was beyond my powers of imagination. It never occurred to me that I’d ever in my life see such fantabulous, exotic birds as cocks-of-the-rock with my own eyes.
Back then, I had no clue about the cock-of-the-rock’s family, Cotingidae, a group of showy birds found only in the American tropics. They belong to the same order as songbirds—Passeriformes—but are in a group of families called “suboscines,” their syrinx muscles different from those of “oscines,” or true songbirds. Suboscine calls can be bizarre and loud; indeed, the White Bellbird of South America has what is considered the loudest bird call in the known universe.
The very first cotinga I ever saw, on January 5, 2001, was the Three-wattled Bellbird. It may not be quite as loud as its White Bellbird sister-species, but its call is audible for over half a mile.
On that first trip to Costa Rica, I saw two other birds in the cotinga family, the Purple-throated Fruitcrow and Rufous Piha. Later in 2001, when Russ and I went to Trinidad and Tobago specifically to get my life list to 1,000, it was another bird in the family who marked the milestone—the Bearded Bellbird, who courteously let Russ take some photos with our primitive pocket-sized digital camera while I recorded its call.
Twenty-five years later, I’ve seen 21 species in the cotinga family, six of them added just this past year thanks to my trips to Guyana and Ecuador.
I don’t have photos of most of them—they usually seem to stay high in the canopy and aren’t very approachable. I got reasonably good looks at a Capuchinbird—a wonderfully funky looking cotinga—in Guyana this spring, but my only photos are screen captures from a digiscoped video our wonderful guide, Leon Moore (of Leon Moore Nature Experience) got with his phone and spotting scope. It was raining hard and he had to hold a baseball cap over the phone and eyepiece the whole while.
But one of the biggest joys of Leon Moore’s tour of Guyana was seeing, for the first time in my life, in two different places, the Guianan Cock-of-the-rock.
I’d already seen the Andean Cock-of-the-rock once, in Peru in 2016, which seemed appropriate because it is Peru’s national bird. This year I got many much more splendid looks in Ecuador. The two cock-of-the-rock species are allopatric—that is, their ranges do not overlap at all.
The Andean Cock-of-the-rock is the larger of the two, about 13” from beak to tail and weighing about 9.3 ounces; the Guianan averages about 12” long and 7.8 ounces. At 15–19” long, our Pileated Woodpecker is much longer than either but its weight is between the two at about 8.8 ounces.
Many more of the birders I know have seen the Andean Cock-of-the-rock than the Guianan one because the infrastructure and the tourism and birding industries in Peru and Ecuador are so much more extensive than those in Guyana and Suriname. But early European explorers interested in natural history arrived in northeastern South America via the Atlantic before they made it deeper into the continent or reached it via the Pacific, so the Guianan Cock-of-the-rock was described for science three decades before the Andean Cock-of-the-rock. In 1760, French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson described the Guianan Cock-of-the-rock, naming it Rupicola, combining the Latin rupis for “rock” and cola for “dweller,” due to the species’ habit of nesting on rocky outcrops and cave walls. (That’s also where our English name, “cock-of-the-rock” comes from.) I saw one nest this spring within a dark cave in Guyana. My photo shows one or more birds in the nest, but I cannot make heads nor tails of it, and I mean that literally.
Brisson’s type specimen was collected in what is now French Guiana or, possibly, Suriname. Linnaeus gave Brisson’s bird the binomial name Rupicola rupicola in 1766. It wasn’t until 1790 that the Andean Cock-of-the-rock was described by English ornithologist John Latham from a specimen collected in Peru, so he assigned it the name Rupicola peruvianus.
In 2016 in Peru, when I got a quick glimpse of an Andean Cock-of-the-rock before the rest of our group saw it, I described it as the color of orange sherbet, but one of the more competitive birders in the group mansplained that Andean Cocks-of-the-rock are bright red so I must have seen something else. Fortunately, others in the group quickly saw it, and our tour leader explained that the four subspecies vary from scarlet to orange. The funny thing is, our eyes do perceive colors differently—I see the males from my Peru photos (like the one above) as orange, but Russ, who loves orange sherbet every bit as much as I do, sees them as red. The Guianan Cock-of-the-rock is a more consistent and unmistakable orange.
Cocks-of-the-rock are lekking birds—that is, males gather in huge, noisy groups in early morning and late afternoon to display and mate with any females who enter the scene and tap them from behind. The females make their choice and quickly move on—the birds don’t form a pair bond and the male takes no part in nesting or raising young. Some males are chosen more than others, and some may have given up on attracting a female or never were interested in them in the first place—about 40 percent of male Guianan Cock-of-the-rocks frequently or at least occasionally mate with other males—some exclusively, without ever showing an interest in females.
Neither of my two encounters with Guianan Cocks-of-the-rock last year were at dawn or dusk, so the birds weren’t vocalizing or displaying. But the morning we visited one Andean Cock-of-the-rock lek, the males were bowing, jumping, flapping their wings, snapping their bills, and calling persistently.
They grew amazingly loud when a female showed up. I got only one quick, poorly focused picture of her…
… before I was distracted by another cotinga lifer showing up—an Amazonian Umbrellabird.
I got a few badly backlit pictures of him and then couldn’t relocate the female cock-of-the-rock.
Oddly enough, my very best cock-of-the-rock photos are not of the birds at either of the leks—we came upon one male loafing at midday who gave us very close, well-lit views from many angles. I took hundreds of photos of him, many which I placed in my “Best Photos” folder, so they turn up on my screensaver.
I can’t see any of my cock-of-the-rock pictures without feeling a deep joy and satisfaction that I’ve seen this wonderful bird that my dear little student was so taken with. I lost touch with him long ago, but I sure hope he’s had the same pleasure.
That Three-wattle Bellbird was one of my favorite birds of that trip to Costa Rica. I even have a Three-wattle Bellbird refrigerator magnet.
I'm heading back to Costa Rica next week and hope to see the Bellbird and Potoos and so much more.
Makes me like Orange again! Thank you.