Slate-throated Redstart, Myioborus minatus
Slate-throated Redstart, Myioborus minatus comptus. Photograph courtesy of Dr. Tom Bartol, Carlsbad, California, taken in the coastal region of Costa Rica, February 2016.
Slate-throated Redstart, Myioborus minatus minatus. Photograph taken within the Reserva Monte Mojino, Alamos, Sonora, January 2019. Photograph and identification courtesy of David F Smith, Alamos, Sonora.
The Slate-throated Redstart, Myioborus minatus comptus and Myioborus minatus minatus, are two of twelve subspecies of Slate-throated Redstarts, of which four are found in Mexico. They are a member of the Parulidae Family of New World Warblers, which has one hundred eleven individual species that have been placed into eighteen genera, and one of twelve members of Slate-throated Redstarts. They are also known as the Slate-throated Whitestart and in Mexico as chipe de montaña.
The Slate-throated Redstart is small in stature. The sexes are similar in appearance. They have large eyes, long rictal bristles at the base of the bill, short broad wings, and a long tail. The Slate-throated Redstart have blackish gray face and throat and its chestnut or tawny crown patch and dark grayish black upperparts. Their wings are black and white tipped and their underparts are dark gray and broadly barred with white. Their breasts vary in color with northern birds being vermilion transitioning to yellow in southern locations. Their tail margin color also varies geographically with northern birds having larger amounts of white than southern birds. Their bill is black, their iris is dark, and their legs and toes are black.
The Slate-throated Redstart are normally found in pairs. They forage in the middle and lower canopy and upper understory consuming flying insects, particularly on planthoppers, flies, butterflies and months, and limited amounts of non-flying invertebrates and insect larvae. They have drawn the attention of the scientific community due to their animated flush-pursuit foraging behavior. They droop their wings and pivot from side-to-side with an erect spread tail that dramatically displays the white patches on the outer tail feathers. These animated displays of the contrasting black-and-white tails startle flying insects, which are then captured via frequently intricate and acrobatic aerial pursuit flights. They frequently join mixed species foraging flocks and often follows army ant swarms to feed off the insects that are stirred up by the ants. They are sexually monogamous with biparental car given to nestlings and fledglings. Both males and females aggressively defend their territories against conspecific intruders.
In Mexico they are found in montane pine-oak forests from northwestern Chihuahua in the Sierra Madre Occidental to Monterrey in the Sierra Madre Oriental south to Guatemala at elevations between 1,000 m (3,300 feet) and 3,000 m (9,840 feet). The comptus subspecies is restricted to the mountains of central and western Costa Rica. The miniatus subspecies is found from southern Sonora, southwestern Chihuahua, and San Luis Potosí south to southern Oaxaca and western Chiapas within pine-oak montane and submontane forests. They are generally non-migratory permanent residents, but some populations are known to descend to lower altitudes in the winter post breeding and return to higher elevations for breeding in the spring.
The Slate-throated Redstart is most likely confused with the Painted Redstart, Myioborus pictus (glossy black mantle, conspicuous white wing patches, and white eye crescent; lacks the chestnut crown patch).
From a conservation perspective the Slate-throated Redstart is currently considered to be of Least Concern with stable, widely distributed populations. They appear to be unaffected by human development.