Musician wren

Musician wren
Musician wren at Presidente Figueiredo, Amazonas state, Brazil
Scientific classification
Kingdom:Animalia
Phylum:Chordata
Class:Aves
Order:Passeriformes
Family:Troglodytidae
Genus:Cyphorhinus
Species: C. arada
Binomial name
Cyphorhinus arada
(Hermann, 1783)
Synonyms
  • Cyphorhinus salvini
  • Cyphorhinus modulator
  • Leucolepis modulator

The musician wren or organ wren (Cyphorhinus arada) is a species of wren named for its elaborate song. It is native to the Amazon Rainforest in South America, and west and southwestwards into the Amazonian Andes. In Portuguese it is known as uirapuru or many other variants of this name, all based on the Tupi wirapu 'ru. Especially in Brazil, the musician wren is the subject of several legends and fables, most relating to its loud and beautiful song. One of these tells that when it starts singing all other birds stop their song to hear it. The musician wren is also believed to bring good luck, which leads some people to kill it in order to have it stuffed.[2] Even though there are no reliable statistics of its numbers, the musician wren, due to its large range and being locally fairly common, is not considered threatened.

Subspecies C. a. salvini (left), and C. a. modulator (right), illustration by Keulemans, 1881

References

  1. ↑ BirdLife International (2012). "Cyphorhinus arada". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2013.2. International Union for Conservation of Nature. Retrieved 26 November 2013.
  2. ↑ Taylor, James L. (1958). "Uirapuru". A Portuguese-English Dictionary. Stanford, CA, US: Stanford University Press. p. 628. ISBN 0-8047-0480-5.

Further reading

  • Doolittle, Emily, and Henrik Brumm. 2012. "O Canto do Uirapuru: Consonant Intervals and Patterns in the Song of the Musician Wren". Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring): 55–85.


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