Shrike-like cotinga

I was fortunate to see a pair catching caterpillars from the undersides of a branch on the Sao Jose trail one morning and have also had sightings on the green and red trails further up in the forest. Like so many of the species in the Atlantic Rainforest it has a very limited distribution and sites to see them are very few. The reliability of the birds at Regua, may make it the best site in the world to see this beautiful species.

One of the reasons that there are so many endemics in the Atlantic Rainforest is because it has been isolated from the only other area of similar habitat (The Amazon basin) for so long, that species have evolved separately. However many of the endemics now are isolated to just a small area of the forest because it has become so fragmented.

Some scientists have proposed that the Atlantic Rainforest is actually more bio-diverse than many parts of the Amazon because of its diverse range of topography, altitude and wide distribution along the South American coastline that passes through different climatic regions.