New species of barbet (cf Dutch Birding 23: 61, 2001)

In July 1996, during an expedition of the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, an unnamed isolated Andes peak (1538 m) was reached, c 77 km west-north-west of Contamana, Loreto, eastern Peru (c 7:05 S, 75:39 W). During the survey of the surrounding cloud forest, the expedition members collected several specimens of a barbet which they immediately expected to be new to science. Recently, this new barbet has been formally described as Scarlet-banded Barbet Capito wallacei (O'Neill, J P, Lane, D F, Kratter, A W, Capparella, A P & Fox Joo, C 2000. A striking new species of barbet (Capitoninae: Capito) from the eastern Andes of Peru. Auk 117: 569-577). Apart from the descriptions of the collected birds, the paper also documents vocalizations and various aspects of the biology based on photographs, tape-recordings and field observations. Also, plumages and vocalizations are extensively compared with those of other Neotropical barbets and discussed in relation to existing phylogenetic studies on the Capitoninae. C wallacei belongs to a group of largely black-and-white plumaged birds, also containing Orange-fronted C squamatus, Spot-crowned C maculicoronatus and White-mantled Barbets C hypoleucus.
The most remarkable aspect of this new barbet is that it appears to be the only Capito species restricted to montane cloud forest, whilst the other species of the genus are widely distributed in the lowland forests of northern South America. Scarlet-banded Barbet is presently only known from the isolated peak of the type locality (so-called 'peak 1538') but it is expected to occur also in cloud forests on other isolated peaks of the same mountain ridge system. The prospects for the protection of the area seem to be promising.
André J van Loon