EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

Araçari Eats a Banana

Pale-mandibled Araçari (Pteroglossus erythropygius), Family Ramphastidae
Mindo, Ecuador

Explanation:  Here is a most likeable member of the toucan family.  Have you ever wondered what they can possibly eat?  And how they can possibly eat with that impossibly overgrown beak?  This week's video answers those questions.

Meet the surprisingly agile Pale-mandibled Araçari of western Ecuador.  

They often occur in small groups, foraging in the subcanopy usually for fruit. This one is solitary for the moment, as it has discovered a cache of bananas staked out to entice and feed the local avifauna, here in the subtropical western slopes of the Andes Mountains.  

A surrealist painter could not devise a more bizarre bird.

 
The red back and rump contrasts well with the dark wings and tail.
Exactly why this bird is so variously, and brightly, colored is not known.

 
Closer in, the yellow iris contrasts with the red ocular skin and
the banana-yellow bill ... appropriate for what it is eating today.

And here it sits, king of its temporary banana domain.