Male

(Shrike-like Cotinga or Brazilian Laniisoma) Laniisoma elegans

Reserva Ecológica de Guapi Assu

Despite considerable field work in all parts of this lovely bird’s range during the intervening decades, David Snow’s words, from over 25 years ago, still strike a resonant chord. He wrote that the Shrike-like Cotinga, as it was then usually known, ‘is in every way an unsatisfactorily known genus…and indeed it has in the past been placed in the related family Pipridae (manakins) based on the basis of its foot structure’, although therein it had been clumped in a subfamily with the three Schiffornis and other enigmatic taxa (Sclater 1888). It is true that we now appear to have reached some certainty that it belongs, with several other species and genera covered in this book, outwith both the Cotingidae and Pipridae, amongst the so-called Schiffornis assemblage, for which the family Tityridae has recently been resurrected (Ericson et al. 2006; proposal to the South American Checklist Committee; Remsen et al. 2008). The nominate form, elegans, is confined to the Serra do Mar Centre of endemism (Cracraft 1985).