A few years ago, I had my first opportunity to visit the Amazonian Basin in eastern Ecuador.
Several days of mist-netting and birding within an intact forest and in surrounding disturbed
habitats turned out to be a pivotal experience, finally crystallizing in my mind a pattern that
every Neotropical ornithologist knows but whose significance has largely escaped us. I am
referring to the fact that most of the birds of the forest understory belong to the large South
American en-demic radiation of songbirds, the suboscines, called the infraorder Tyrannides …