Orange-collared Manakin

How to find it

Start with your ears. A Costa Rican reserve resident suggests listening for the buzz and snaps first, then watching that spot from a respectful distance for the bright orange collar. In Carara National Park, the River Trail, also called Laguna Meandrica, has two or three leks along it. They are not always active, but you should find some manakin action. One trip report found a lek on the right, about 10 to 20 paces past a small concrete bridge over a stream, in early January and again in late March.

How to recognise it

The male is a small, plump bird, about 10 cm long and about 15.5 g.

Look for these marks:

- black cap, back, wings and tail

- orange face, neck and breast

- olive-green rump

- bright yellow belly

- short tail, heavy hooked bill and orange legs

Females are olive-green above with yellowish underparts. They look much like the females of many other manakin species, so they are hard to name by sight alone. In dark understory one female looked simply grey to a Costa Rican birder.

What it sounds like

Recording: anasacuta, CC BY 4.0, source, read 4 Nov 2026.

Behaviour and diet

Males clear a small patch of forest floor down to bare earth and leap between thin upright sticks at a shared display ground, called a lek. When a female is present, males jump together and cross over each other.

Lek sizes vary, and one account describes up to two dozen males at once. Away from the lek, the bird eats fruit and small arthropods, and it catches the arthropods in short aerial sallies.

Where it lives

In Costa Rica this manakin lives in the understory of humid forest on the Pacific slope of the southwest. It ranges over the southern Pacific slope of Costa Rica and western Panama, east to the Azuero Peninsula.

Across its whole range it uses mature humid forest, old secondary forest, gallery forest, forest edges with fruit trees, shade plantations and gardens. It occurs from sea level to about 1100 m, and a Costa Rican writer says it keeps to low levels just above the forest floor.

Similar birds

Males of the four Manacus species share black caps and wings, but this one has orange-yellow underparts while the others are paler yellow or white. On the Caribbean slope of Central America the White-collared Manakin replaces it, and the Golden-collared Manakin takes over to the east, toward northwest Colombia. Females are the real puzzle: a female looks almost the same as a female White-collared Manakin, and the female Blue-crowned Manakin looks much like the more olive female Orange-collared.

Names and lore in Costa Rica

The official Spanish name is Saltarín Cuellinaranja. Costa Ricans also use the nicknames Quiebrapalos (stick breaker) and Hombrecillo (little man). Another Spanish name listed is Matraquero de cuello anaranjado.

Status and conservation

The AOCR list marks it as a resident endemic (R-END), and the IUCN rates it Least Concern, though it is fairly common with a somewhat restricted range.

Photography tips

Listen for the buzz and snaps first, then watch that spot from a respectful distance for the bright orange collar. One reserve resident found his earlier photos blurry. Manakins in general are small forest birds that are hard to see and harder to photograph, and a flash was used for most photos on one well-known page about the family.