Pipra pipra

The white-crowned manakin (Pseudopipra pipra) is a small passerine bird in the manakin family Pipridae. It is a resident breeder in the tropical New World from Costa Rica to northeastern Peru and eastern Brazil. It was traditionally placed in the genus Pipra, but is now placed in its own monotypic genus Pseudopipra. It is a small, compact bird about 10 cm (3.9 in) long. Males have black plumage with a white crown which can be erected as a crest. Females and juveniles are olive-green, with a grey head and throat, and greyish-green or olive underparts. At breeding time, males are involved in a lekking behaviour. This is a fairly common species with a wide range, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature has rated its conservation status as being of 'least concern'. The white-crowned manakin was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae and given the binomial name Parus pipra. Linnaeus based his short description on that published by the Dutch collector Albertus Seba in 1735 in his Thesaurus and although Linnaeus specified the location as in Indiis, it is probable that Seba's specimen came from Surinam. The specific name pipra is the Ancient Greek word for a small unidentified bird mentioned by Aristotle. The white-crowned manakin was subsequently placed in the genus Pipra. In 1992, the American ornithologist Richard Prum published a study of the syringeal morphology of birds in Pipra. He found that the genus was polyphyletic and proposed that it should be split with the white-crowned manakin placed in the resurrected genus Dixiphia that had originally been introduced by the German ornithologist Ludwig Reichenbach in 1850. Subsequent molecular phylogenetic studies confirmed that Pipra, as traditionally defined, was polyphyletic and most ornithologists followed Prum and placed the white-crowned manakin in Dixiphia. However, in 2016 Guy Kirwan and colleagues showed that Dixiphia was actually a junior synonym of Arundinicola and erected the genus Pseudopipra as a replacement. There are 13 recognised subspecies. It is common in mountain foothills, breeding mainly between 800–1600 m, although in northeastern Venezuela it apparently occurs down to sea level.