Horned curassow

Appearance

It has a distinctive horn or casque on the forehead that projects for over 6 cm (2.4 in). The plumage is generally black, but lacks a blue sheen in primary feathers, and has a white belly, thigh tufts and under-tail coverts. The tail also has white tips.

It measures 85 to 95 cm (33 to 37 in) in length. Body mass in large males is up to 3.7 to 3.9 kg (8.2 to 8.6 lb) and only the great curassow is heavier amongst the cracids, although the black curassow and the closely related helmeted curassow are around the same length.

It was first described by James Bond and Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee in 1939 from a specimen collected in Bolivia, and further birds that were described from Peru in 1971 were thought to be a new subspecies.

Range and habitat

The horned curassow, or southern helmeted curassow, is a bird in the family Cracidae found in humid tropical and subtropical forests. Even so, the taxonomic position (as subspecies or independent species) of the birds found in Peru in 1971 is unclear. The horned curassow as originally described is endemic to Bolivia.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

In crisis

It is an uncommon bird with a limited range and is suffering from habitat loss, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature has rated its conservation status as being "critically endangered".

Horned curassow is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Horned curassow, Wikidata item Q1078565. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.