Masked Tityra
- Family
- Tityridae
Where and when to see the Masked Tityra
DraftOn the Yucatán Peninsula
It lives along forest edges, in second growth and in open country with tall trees. Look for pairs or small groups high in fruiting trees or on dead trunks with woodpecker holes; its grunts give it away.
Where it’s reported most
- Ruta de los CenotesPuerto Morelos, Quintana Roo
- MuyilFelipe Carrillo Puerto, Quintana Roo
- CobáTulum, Quintana Roo
- Chichén ItzáTinum, Yucatán
When
All year
Reported all year.
Reports relative to effort
- January: 70%
- February: 78%
- March: 83%
- April: 79%
- May: 99%
- June: 100%
- July: 87%
- August: 79%
- September: 69%
- October: 64%
- November: 73%
- December: 73%
Data: eBird and other datasets via GBIF.org (CC BY 4.0), 2015–2026 · Base map: Natural Earth
Perches on exposed branches at the forest edge and in clearings with tall trees, eating fruit and large insects. Its low, nasal grunts are the reason for its Spanish name.
- Identification
- A stocky, pale silvery-grey bird with black wings and a broad black band near the white tail tip. Bare pinkish-red skin surrounds the eye like a mask, and the stout red bill ends in black. Males have black around the face; females are browner or greyer above.
- Voice
- A dry, nasal “querp”, like a grunt, and croaks that recall a quacking duck.
What the photo doesn’t show
DraftEviction by leaf litter
It can’t dig its own nest hole, so it takes one from a woodpecker. Rather than fight, it keeps stuffing dead leaves into the hole, even one the woodpeckers are sleeping in, until they give up and carve a new one. 1
Grunts like a piglet
Its Mexican name, titira puerquito (“piglet tityra”), suits its voice. Alexander Skutch, who watched these birds in Costa Rica for a dozen years, wrote that its low grunt is unlike any other bird’s and has been compared to a pig’s. 1,2
A paler local race
The tityras of Yucatán and northern Quintana Roo belong to their own subspecies, deses, which is paler overall than the others. Birds from Campeche south to Nicaragua belong to the darker-headed personata. 3,4
Dance away your warts
Among the Mopan Maya of southern Belize, a person with warts should find a group of these birds calling in a tree and dance along with them: the more excited the birds get, the sooner the warts go. Other Maya peoples have the same cure with other birds. 5
Sources
- Skutch 1946, The Auk 63: 327: Life history of the Costa Rican Tityra (opens in a new tab)
- eBird: Masked Tityra (opens in a new tab)
- Birds of the World (Cornell Lab): Masked Tityra (opens in a new tab)
- Wikipedia: Masked tityra (opens in a new tab)
- Hull & Fergus 2009: Birds and the Mopan Maya of Belize (opens in a new tab)
- BirdLife International, Data Zone: Masked Tityra (opens in a new tab)
- IUCN Red List category, via GBIF: Tityra semifasciata (opens in a new tab)
Map and months: 12,794 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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