Order
Accipitriformes
Family
Accipitridae
Genus
Spizaetus
 
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Version 1.0

This is a historic version of this account.  Current version

SPECIES

Ornate Hawk-Eagle Spizaetus ornatus

Marshall J. Iliff
Version: 1.0 — Published March 26, 2010

Systematics

Geographic Variation

Two subspecies are known:

S. o. vacarius is the more northerly of the two, occurring throughout the Middle American portions of the range and west of the Andes from western Colombia to swouthwestern Ecuador (formerly northwestern Peru).

Nominate S. o. ornatus is found in the remainder of the range, from eastern Colombia, Venezuela, and Trinidad, south to Bolivia, northern Argentina, and southern Brazil.

Compared to vacarius, the nominate form has brighter, richer rufous on the head and neck.

Subspecies

Related Species

Several independent analyses of DNA sequence data have found that Ornate Hawk-Eagle and Black-and-chestnut Eagle (Spizaetus isidori) are sister species and that Black Hawk-Eagle (Spizaetus tyrannus) is basal to these three species (Helbig et al. 2005, Lerner and Mindell 2005, Haring et al. 2007). Furthermore, these studies showed that Old World hawk-eagles (Nisaetus), previously also classified in Spizaetus, are not a sister group to New World hawk-eagles. This revised phylogeny has been adopted by the South American Classification Committee (Remsen et al. 2010).

Recommended Citation

Iliff, M. J. (2010). Ornate Hawk-Eagle (Spizaetus ornatus), version 1.0. In Neotropical Birds Online (T. S. Schulenberg, Editor). Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.2173/nb.orheag1.01