Purple Honeycreeper

The Purple Honeycreeper is a small, richly colored bird of the tanager family, with males cloaked in a deep, velvety violet-purple that can appear almost black in poor light but glows vividly in direct sun. The wings and tail are black, and the legs are a bright, contrasting yellow, a useful field mark alongside the overall purple tone.

Females are quite different, being green overall with a distinctive blue throat and a buffy or olive wash on the underparts, providing better camouflage for a bird that does most of the nesting duties alone. Both sexes share the family's characteristic fine, decurved bill suited to nectar-feeding.

Purple Honeycreepers are frequent visitors to flowering and fruiting canopy trees, often in the company of other tanagers and honeycreepers.

Key field marks

• Male: deep violet-purple body, black wings and tail, bright yellow legs
• Female: green overall with a blue throat patch and buffy underparts
• Fine, slightly decurved bill
• Small, compact honeycreeper shape

Similar species

Red-legged Honeycreeper male is violet-blue rather than deep purple and has red, not yellow, legs. Female Purple Honeycreepers are distinguished from other green honeycreepers by the contrasting blue throat patch.

Habitat

This species favors humid forest canopy, forest edge, and adjacent secondary growth, generally staying high in the canopy where flowering and fruiting trees are found.

Range

It occurs in northern South America, including Colombia, Venezuela, the Guianas, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, and it is also found on Trinidad.

Migration

The Purple Honeycreeper is a non-migratory resident, though it may move locally to track flowering and fruiting trees.

Behavior

Purple Honeycreepers are active canopy foragers, often seen in small groups or joining mixed-species flocks with other tanagers, honeycreepers, and dacnis species.

Voice

Its calls are thin, high-pitched, and somewhat nasal notes, given while foraging or in flight, generally unremarkable in tone.

Feeding

It feeds on nectar probed from flowers using its fine decurved bill, along with small fruits and insects gleaned from the canopy.

Nesting and breeding

The female builds a small cup nest, typically well hidden in canopy foliage, and incubates and raises the young largely without help from the male, consistent with the species' loosely polygynous mating system.