Hooded Oriole
- Family
- Icteridae
- Conservation status (IUCN)
- Least Concern (2025) 8
Where and when to see the Hooded Oriole
DraftOn the Yucatán Peninsula
It lives along the coast and in the north of the peninsula, islands included, in scrub, forest edges, villages and gardens. Look in palms and flowering trees, where it hangs its nest or drinks nectar.
Where it’s reported most
- Poniente Ecological ParkMérida, Yucatán
- Kabah Ecological ParkBenito Juárez, Quintana Roo
- Puerto AventurasPlaya del Carmen, Quintana Roo
- MuyilFelipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo
When
All year
Reported all year.
Reports relative to effort
- January: 86%
- February: 93%
- March: 92%
- April: 97%
- May: 95%
- June: 100%
- July: 100%
- August: 91%
- September: 69%
- October: 74%
- November: 80%
- December: 83%
Data: eBird and other datasets via GBIF.org (CC BY 4.0), 2015–2026 · Base map: Natural Earth
Common in villages, gardens and coastal scrub, where it often hangs its woven nest from the underside of a palm frond. On the peninsula it is present all year.
- Identification
- The male is bright orange to yellow-orange, with a black face and bib, black back, wings and tail, and two white wing-bars. The female is olive-green above and yellowish below, with the same white wing-bars. Both have a thin, slightly curved black bill.
- Voice
- A quiet, jumbled song of whistles, chatters and warbles, sometimes with imitations of other birds. Its common call is a whistled “wheet”, and its alarm is a fast, shrill chatter.
What the photo doesn’t show
DraftStitched to a palm
It often hangs its nest, a woven pouch of grass and plant fibres, from the underside of a palm frond, stitched on to the leaf itself. In California it nests in palms so often that the local race was once called the Palm-leaf Oriole. 1,2
A shortcut into the flower
It drinks nectar from agaves, aloes, hibiscus and other tubular flowers, often by piercing the base of the flower with its sharp bill. That way it gets the nectar without pollinating the plant. It is an acrobatic feeder and often hangs upside down to reach flowers. 3,4
The brightest of them all
The peninsula has its own resident race, igneus, found along the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula and its islands, including Holbox, Isla Mujeres and Cozumel, south to northern Belize. It is the brightest, most orange form of the species. 4,5
A name from Bonampak
In Yucatec Maya, orioles are called yúuyum, and EncicloVida lists yúuyum and chan yúuyum for this species. The word is old: a figure painted in the Classic Maya murals of Bonampak, in Chiapas, is named Aj K’an Yuyum, “Yellow Oriole”. 6,7
Sources
- Audubon Field Guide: Hooded Oriole (opens in a new tab)
- Birds of the World (Cornell Lab): Hooded Oriole (opens in a new tab)
- Animal Diversity Web: Icterus cucullatus (opens in a new tab)
- Wikipedia: Hooded oriole (opens in a new tab)
- Wikipedia: Icterus cucullatus (opens in a new tab)
- Maya Decipherment: A glyph for yuyum, “oriole”, at Bonampak (opens in a new tab)
- EncicloVida (CONABIO): Icterus cucullatus (opens in a new tab)
- BirdLife International, Data Zone: Hooded Oriole (opens in a new tab)
Map and months: 35,907 records from 2015–2026 from eBird, iNaturalist, and others, via GBIF.org (CC BY 4.0), in 0.1° squares (about 10 km). eBird: doi.org/10.15468/aomfnb.
Months: the species’ records ÷ all bird records that month, scaled to the busiest month. It allows for birding effort; it is not the chance of seeing it. A blank square: few or no reports, not necessarily absent.
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