A major barrier to advancing ornithology is the systemic exclusion of professionals from the Global South. A recent special feature, Advances in Neotropical Ornithology, and a shortfalls analysis therein, unintentionally followed a long-standing pattern of highlighting individuals, knowledge, and views from the Global North, while largely omitting the perspectives of people based within the Neotropics. Here, we review current strengths and opportunities in the practice of Neotropical ornithology. Further, we discuss problems with assessing the state of Neotropical ornithology through a northern lens, including discovery narratives, incomplete (and biased) understanding of history and advances, and the promotion of agendas that, while currently popular in the north, may not fit the needs and realities of Neotropical research. We argue that future advances in Neotropical ornithology will critically depend on identifying and addressing the systemic barriers that hold back ornithologists who live and work in the Neotropics: unreliable and limited funding, exclusion from international research leadership, restricted dissemination of knowledge (e.g., through language hegemony and citation bias), and logistical barriers. Moving forward, we must examine and acknowledge the colonial roots of our discipline, and explicitly promote anti-colonial agendas for research, training, and conservation. We invite our colleagues within and beyond the Neotropics to join us in creating new models of governance that establish research priorities with vigorous participation of ornithologists and communities within the Neotropical region. To include a diversity of perspectives, we must systemically address discrimination and bias rooted in the socioeconomic class system, anti-Blackness, anti-Brownness, anti-Indigeneity, misogyny, homophobia, tokenism, and ableism. Instead of seeking individual excellence and rewarding top-down leadership, institutions in the North and South can promote collective leadership. In adopting these approaches, we, ornithologists, will join a community of researchers across academia building new paradigms that can reconcile our relationships and transform science. Spanish and Portuguese translations are available in the Supplementary Material.

Loud mechanical sounds with a communication role are called sonations. Male Subtropical Doraditos (Pseudocolopteryx acutipennis) exhibit five conspicuously modified primaries suspected of sonating. Here we 1) describe feather modifications, 2) describe three different territorial/aggressive contexts for these sounds: One-perch aerial displays, Two-perch aerial displays and Chukrut pursuits, 3) investigate the kinematics of the most common display (One-perch aerial display) and the physical mechanisms of sonation using synchronized high-speed video and audio, and 4) assess the roles of modified wing feathers in all contexts by experimental manipulation in four individuals. Primaries p3 to p7 were modified in adult males but not in females: p3 was pointed with a reduced distal third to the outer vane; p4 and p5 were slim and falciform with pointed tips curved outwards; p6 was broad, massive and subtly S-shaped, with a spatulate tip; and p7 was large with the distal third of the outer vane abruptly reduced, and the inner vane with a shallow concave sub-apical emargination. One-perch aerial displays consisted of perched short nasal introductory syllables accelerating until the bird performed a super-rapid circular flight of ∽15 cm in diameter from and to the same branch, during which two syringeal syllables and three mechanical syllables (chik… chik…. chik-chik frrrottt). The syllables were produced during rapid downstrokes by fluttering feathers and were bisonic, being conformed by two simultaneous main tonal, flat, narrow band sounds: a low-pitched note (f0 ∽c. 1 kHz) and a high-pitched note (f0 ∽c. 3.7 kHz). p7 is the necessary and sufficient sound source of the low-pitched note (removal of p7 caused the sound to disappear) and p3 is the sound source of the high-pitched note, being necessary but perhaps not sufficient (removal of p3 caused the sound to disappear); the other modified feathers seem involved in different roles related to either producing the sonation (p4 and p5 interacting with p3) or allowing it (p6 raising dorsally letting p7 flutter freely; removal of p6 did not affect sound production). The specialized shape of p6 might be compromised to allow sonation of p7 without losing flight functionality. Sonations in Subtropical Doraditos occupy the position of the vocal flourish in the songs of other Pseudocolopteryx suggesting the evolutionary replacement of vocal by mechanical sounds. We propose that wing songs in flying birds may be constrained to occur in temporally broken patterns due to intrinsic features of flapped flight and structurally constrained by the demands of creating an airfoil.

Citizen science data are increasingly used for biodiversity monitoring. However, concerns are often raised over the accuracy of species identifications in citizen science databases, as data are collected mostly by non-professionals. Misidentifications can simultaneously generate two error types: false positives (erroneous reports of a species) and false negatives (lack of reports of the misidentified species). Large-scale assessments of identification errors should provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of citizen science data. Here we show that citizen science photographic data for birds are trustworthy overall, although problems arise in hard-to-identify bird groups. We reviewed over 104 000 images of 377 passerine species from the southern Neotropics (Argentina) stored in eBirda large citizen science platformand quantified erroneous reports to calculate precision and recall metrics as measures for data accuracy. Precision increases with fewer false positives and recall increases with fewer false negatives; hence, high values of precision and recall will mirror a higher data accuracy. We found that 97% of the photos of all species were correctly identified. Most species (77%; n = 291) showed high accuracy in their identifications (precision and recall > 95%), with 122 species showing no errors. A few hard-to-identify species (10%; n = 40) showed low levels of data quality (63-90% precision or recall). Similarly, few species (12%; n = 46) exhibited intermediate precision or recall scores (90-95%). Further, we uncovered the existence of a complex network of cross-identifications composed of 272 species, with a predominance of tyrant flycatchers and ovenbirds, reflecting the strong traffic of errors that occurs within these families. To our knowledge, our study provides the first large-scale quantification of identification errors in photos submitted by citizen science contributors. We underscore the relevance of performing such assessments to understand how identification errors are distributed across a database before analysing data, and provide tools for citizen science stakeholders to direct more specific efforts toward species that need an improvement in data quality.