Critically Endangered
Araripe manakin
Chiroxiphia bokermanni
Araripe manakin, also called Blue Manakins, is a perching bird in the family Pipridae (order Passeriformes) — Chiroxiphia bokermanni, recorded as Critically Endangered and tied to Brazil.
Appearance
As typical of most manakins, males and females have a strong sexual dimorphism in the colours of the plumage. The strikingly patterned males have predominantly white plumage. With the exception of the white little wings coverts, the wings are black as the tail.
As in the helmeted manakin, it is a relatively large and long-tailed manakin, with a total length of c. 14.5 centimetres (5.7 in).
It was discovered in 1996 and scientifically described in 1998.
Range and habitat
This species is endemic to the Chapada do Araripe (Araripe uplands) in the Brazilian state of Ceará in the north eastern region of the country. It is only fifty kilometres long and one kilometre wide and the typical habitat apparently is a consequence of the soils formed from the Santana Formation limestone. The pure breeding range has a size of only 1 km2 (0.39 mi2) and lies in a theme park.
GBIF currently lists 219,387 occurrence points. Those points follow where people logged the taxon — museum drawers and surveys included — not a closed range boundary.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
This species consumes both plant and animal materials as part of their diet. Approximately 80% of their diet comes from the plant Clidemia biserrata.
Araripe Manakins consume fruit and arthropods, although fruits are the primary item in their diet. Females have a more diverse diet than males, because the more cryptic olive-green plumage of females provides them with a greater degree of camouflage in forests, allowing them to find food with less predation, meanwhile, males are a very bright white color, that makes them more vulnerable to predation. Females lay 1- or 2-egg clutches and may attempt renesting if the nest fails.
In crisis
In 2000 there was an estimated population of less than 50 individuals and it was considered as one of the rarest birds in Brazil and in the world. In 2003 the estimations were more optimistic and BirdLife International assumed the population of 49 to 250 individuals. In 2004 it proceeded on the assumption that an estimated 783 individuals exist in the wild that was based on 43 discovered males.
The last assessed population was on August 7, 2018. An estimated 150 - 700 mature individuals are living in Brazil.
Araripe manakin is Critically 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 Araripe manakin, Wikidata item Q138338990 and GBIF occurrence geography. 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.
