The azulona is a game bird found in the Brazilian Amazon and in the upper Paraguay basin, exclusively in areas of the terra-firme forest. It has a yellowish jaw and bluish gray legs, a dark crown and neck, with a throat and band on the side of the neck that are scaled in black and white. On top, dark olive gray, with black bars and vermiculations. Underneath, lighter brownish gray; red chrissus. Its color is slate gray with a bluish tinge. It measures between 43 and 52 centimeters and about 1 kilo and nine hundred grams or more.
It has a greater flight distance on approach than the macuco, and those who have seen it up close observe that it has a longer tail, showing an adaptation for greater flight capacity, possibly because it evolves in an environment with greater pressure from predators. Another evidence of this is the fact that the azulona squawks much less than the macuco, probably to reduce the chances of its location.
The close affinities between macuco and azulona have always been the subject of cogitation of the systems that studied them. The differences between them are, practically, in the color, since, morphologically, they are identical. Only in terms of weight, the data show a slight advantage for Azulona. It is likely that macuco and azulona come from a common ancestor and that, for climatic reasons, they were separated by the occurrence of continuity solutions between the forested areas of the Amazon and the Southeast. They kept a lot in common, such as the voice, equally efficient for both, in the similar biotopes in which they remained. The azulona presents subspecies or geographic races, along its areas of occurrence, where it shares the habitat with other representatives of the genus Tinamus, such as the inhambu-galinha and the inhambu red-headed, the latter found in the lowland forest.
16 окт 2024
