Hundreds of Neotropical birds named for clay ovens
The ovenbird family, Furnariidae, counts around 321 species of small insect-eating birds ranging from Mexico to the far south of South America. It takes its name from the horneros, whose rounded clay nests look like little bread ovens, even though most relatives build with sticks instead.
The name comes from Spanish, where horno means oven and gives the hornero its title. Only horneros make the famous mud domes; other members nest on beds of sticks, in burrows, or in cracks in rock. Whatever the design, every furnariid nest has a roof. The female lays as many as six pale blue, greenish or white eggs, which hatch after 15 to 22 days, and the chicks leave the nest roughly two to three weeks later.
Adults run from about 9 to 35 centimetres long. Individual species tend to stick to one kind of habitat, but the family as a whole reaches almost every setting in the American tropics. Rufous horneros live in city parks, many foliage-gleaners work the Amazon lowlands, and several miners survive on cold, bare Andean plateaus. The seaside and surf cinclodes even forage along rocky shorelines.
Birders should beware a naming trap: the North American bird called simply the ovenbird, Seiurus aurocapilla, is a wood warbler and only a distant relative. Classification inside the family has also shifted. DNA studies led scientists to fold the woodcreepers, once a separate family, into Furnariidae, although some researchers keep them apart and split the traditional ovenbirds in two instead.
Genetic work shows that the miners and leaftossers of the subfamily Sclerurinae branched off first. Several genera have been redrawn in recent years, such as Tarphonomus in 2007, Geocerthia in 2009 and Neophilydor in 2023, each carved out for species previously placed elsewhere.
Source: Ovenbird (family)
