This black cacique has a red lower back and rump. It inhabits lowlands from Central America to western Ecuador.
Adults of both sexes are black, with a scarlet lower back and rump. Juveniles have a duller brownish-orange rump. Wetmore’s 1984 broad C. uropygialis account says the Panamanian microrhynchus form has a slimmer bill than pacificus; one male had a pale blue iris and a bill yellow at the base, becoming green toward the middle and tip. The females he collected had similar bill colours.
In Wetmore’s 1984 account, the Panamanian microrhynchus form, then treated as a subspecies of C. uropygialis, lived in lowland forest on both slopes and reached 900 m in the mountains. A pair was found at Utivé in March 1949, and a female carrying nesting material was recorded in the Canal Zone in March 1975. Its nest is a long pouch. The pacificus form was observed as six birds feeding low in riverside thickets along the Río Jaqué in eastern Darién; one male collected there on 13 April 1946 was in breeding condition.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.