At a nature reserve in the Amazon Basin of eastern Ecuador.Grey-winged trumpeters are often tamed by Amerindian groups as sentinels or watch dogs, as they are easily spooked and will begin to give loud alarm calls. They're also favored for their particular tenacity for hunting snakes. The one we met was rather friendly and liked to follow us around, probably because he/she was a tamed individual. Fitting with this anecdote, trumpeters are highly social species, usually occurring in large groups, and although this one was alone, just like with tamed dogs I imagine humans serve as sufficient social substitutes once habituated.To hear their call, see:
www.xeno-canto.org/61297Although they're not technically flightless, they're said to be weak fliers, and rather prefer to run when escaping from predators, which they do very well and at high speeds. I can remember how gracefully this individual walked, which is very distinct from most birds' awkward gaits and waddles. Many birds have independently evolved highly cursorial (running lifestyle) morphologies, and many of these had previously been allied with the Gruiformes (the order to which trumpeters, or psophiids, belong), such as the modern cariamids (or seriemas) of southeastern South America and their close relatives, the phorusrhacids, which were incredibly large predatory birds with vestigial wings and utterly massive raptorial beaks. These so called Terror Birds ruled as top predators in South America for millions of years until they disappear from the record during the Pleistocene about 1.8 mya (signficantly before humans arrive and the major end-Pleistocene exticntion event, but who knows if some individuals lived one until this point). Maybe trumpeters will evolve into the new terrors of the world one day? (Given that many of the independent lineages of large predatory birds, like phorusrhacids, gastornithids, and dromornithids, seemed to have evolved in times where few large placental carnivores were around, this may no longer be feasible in South America now that the Old World/North American placental mammals have settled into South America so firmly since the Great American Interchange 3 mya, although notably South America significantly lacks true megafauna predators as of today, so who knows.)
