| Great Curassow | |
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| male | |
| female rufous morph | |
| Conservation status | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Aves |
| Order: | Galliformes |
| Family: | Cracidae |
| Genus: | Crax |
| Species: | C. rubra |
| Binomial name | |
| Crax rubra Linnaeus, 1758 |
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| Subspecies | |
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The Great Curassow (Crax rubra) is a large, pheasant-like bird from the Neotropics. At 78–100 centimetres (31–39 in) in length and 3.1–4.8 kilograms (6.8–11 lb) in weight, this is a very large cracid.[1][2] No other cracid match its maximum weight, but its length is matched by a few other cracids.[1][3][4]
The male is black with a curly crest, a white belly, and a yellow knob on its bill.[1] There are three morphs of female Great Curassows:[1] Barred morph females with barred neck, mantle, wings and tail, rufous morph with an overall reddish brown plumage and a barred tail, and dark morph female with a blackish neck, mantle and tail (the tail often faintly vermiculated), and some barring to the wings. In most regions only one or two morphs occur, and females showing a level of intermediacy between these morphs are known (e.g. resembling rufous morph, but with black neck and faint vermiculations to wings).
A monogamous species, the Great Curassow is distributed in rainforest from eastern Mexico throughout Central America, to western Colombia and northwest Ecuador.[1] Its diet consists mainly of fruits, figs and arthropods.
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The Great Curassow is the most northernly Crax species. It is part of a clade that inhabited the north of South America since about 9 mya (Tortonian, Late Miocene). As the Colombian Andes were uplifted around 6 mya, this species' ancestors were cut off from the population to their southeast. The latter would in time evolve into the Blue-billed Curassow. The ancestral Great Curassows then spread along the Pacific side of the Andes, and into Central America during the Pliocene and Pleistocene (Pereira & Baker 2004) as part of the Great American Interchange.
Due to ongoing habitat loss and overhunting in some areas, the Great Curassow is evaluated as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. It is listed on Appendix III of CITES in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Colombia and Honduras. Of the smaller subspecies griscomi of Cozumel Island, only a few hundred remain. Its population seems either to have been slowly increasing since the 1980s, or to be fluctuating at a low level; it is vulnerable to hurricanes (del Hoyo 1994, BirdLife International 2004, see also Cozumel Thrasher).
This species has proven to produce fertile hybrids with its closest living relative the Blue-billed Curassow, and also with the much more distantly related Black Curassow (del Hoyo 1994)
