The upper margin of the black facial mask passes well above the eye; this is a little different from the figures in Ridgely and Tudor 1994 and Hilty 2003, where the dorsal limit of the black stripe runs lower, and coincides with the superior part of the eye-ring.

The speciment shown in Develey and Endrigo 2004, presumably from São Paulo, is similar to the bird shown here. Maybe the broader facial stripe is a characteristic of the local subspecies M. s. pallidiventris, which is distributed from Pará to NE Argentina (for subspecies, see HBW 9).