Bucco tamatia
Silhouette: Matt Wilkins (Photo by Len Blumin) · PhyloPic
In 3 days <5%
The spotted puffbird (Bucco tamatia) is a species of puffbird in the family Bucconidae, the puffbirds, nunlets, and nunbirds. It is found in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.
The spotted puffbird was described in 1648 by the German naturalist Georg Marcgrave in his Historia Naturalis Brasiliae. In his Latin text Marcgrave used the name Tamatia Brasiliensibus where tamatia was the local name for the bird in the Tupi language. Later ornithologists such as Francis Willughby in 1678 and John Ray in 1713 based their own description on that by Marcgrave. In 1780 the French polymath Comte de Buffon described and illustrated Le Tamatia from a specimen that had been collected in Cayenne, French Guiana. When the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin revised and expanded Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae in 1788 he included the spotted puffbird and cited the works by the earlier ornithologists. He placed the species with the other puffbirds in the genus Bucco and coined the binomial name Bucco tamatia.
The spotted puffbird has sometimes been placed in the genus Nystactes. It is closely related to the sooty-capped puffbird... Wikipedia →
| # | Park | Country | Daily sighting probability |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Amacayacu National Natural Park | 🇨🇴 Colombia | |
| 2 | Yasuní National Park | 🇪🇨 Ecuador |
Rare
Under 5% of wildlife watchers report a Spotted Puffbird sighting in Yasuní National Park on a given day, based on 12 verified sightings from GBIF citizen-science data from 2019 to 2026. It is the 489th most-seen of the 533 birds we can rate there. Over three days the chance rises to under 5%, if each day is a fresh chance.
Any time of year
In every month with enough records, under 5% of wildlife watchers report a Spotted Puffbird in Yasuní National Park on a given day, so our monthly data shows no clear season.
Between 8 and 11 am
Across all the parks we cover, that three-hour window holds the most Spotted Puffbird sightings with a recorded time, and about 9 in 10 of them come between 6 am and 6 pm: it is a daytime animal.
2nd of 2
Of the 2 parks where we can rate Spotted Puffbird sightings, Yasuní National Park ranks 2nd at under 5%. The best odds are in Amacayacu National Natural Park (Colombia, about 10%).
GBIF citizen-science records
It is estimated from how often the Spotted Puffbird is recorded against all the birds logged in Yasuní National Park (12 verified sightings from 2019 to 2026), calibrated against known sighting rates. Figures are rounded to the nearest 10% because citizen-science data supports honest approximations, not decimals, and months with records from fewer than five people show "—". How it works.
