EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week

Red-fronted Barbet of Eastern Africa

Red-fronted Barbet (Tricholaema diademata)
Family Capitonidae or Lybiidae
Kenya, Africa

Explanation:  Who is making off with a seed in this week's photo?  Why, this is a diminutive, uncommon, mostly solitary, and easily-overlooked Red-fronted Barbet, found only in eastern Africa.  

We are back on the shores of Lake Baringo in the Rift Valley of Kenya, eastern Africa.  And ready for another lesson on key ecological functions of wildlife and how a seemingly insignificant bird can play an important ecological role in its woodland ecosystem.  

Barbets are the ecological analogues of woodpeckers ... both occur in the New World tropics, and much of the Old World, although it is unclear why  barbets are wholly absent from temperate North America.  Like woodpeckers, most barbets have thick resilient bills adapted for chiseling or hammering out cavities in trees.  Unlike woodpeckers, some barbets even carve cavities in termite mounds or in the ground.  

Barbets will consume insects and might play a role in helping control populations of some insect pests.  But they also consume and disperse fruits and seeds, and thus might play a key role in the forests and woodlands as dispersal agents of plants.  

Some barbets will take over and, like some chickadees, enlarge natural tree hollows or cavities first created by woodpeckers.  Then other species will inhabit those cavities afterwards, as well.  There can be quite a chain of dependency on woodpecker and barbet cavity-excavators and cavity-enlargers.  

Such ecological roles -- insect control, plant dispersal, cavity creation and maintenance -- might very well take on key importance and provide for fully-functional ecosystems ... but they are largely unstudied and, for this tiny, unheralded bird.