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Palm Tanager | Thraupis palmarum
Palmtangare | Tangara palmera
The Palm Tanager is, as its name suggests, closely tied to palms. It clambers nimbly over palm fronds, often hanging upside down, and searches for insects on the underside of the leaves. On Trinidad and Tobago it is as common as the Blue-grey Tanager, with which it often associates.
Voice
The song is a fast, squeaky twitter, similar to that of Blue-grey Tanager but somewhat fuller. Calls are short, high chip and tseeu notes.
Recording: Juan Freile — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
18–19 cm, slim, with a fairly long tail and a short, stout bill. The plumage is greyish olive-green, with a slight sheen on the head and underparts and darker towards the rear. The wings are two-toned: the base of the flight feathers and the coverts are pale yellow-green and the outer half black, so perched birds show a black wing tip and flying birds a pale band. The tail is blackish with green edges. The sexes are alike; females are sometimes slightly duller.
Confusion species
Blue-grey Tanager Thraupis episcopus has the same shape but is blue-grey, without the contrast between pale wing base and black wing tip. Olive-grey Saltator Saltator olivascens is larger and greyer, with a white supercilium, a pale throat and a heavier bill. Female honeycreepers are smaller, with thin, curved bills.
Habitat
Anywhere with palms: gardens, villages and towns, coconut and cocoa plantations, pasture with scattered trees, forest edges, secondary forest and palm swamps. It eats fruit, nectar and insects. The nest is a bulky cup in a tree, usually a palm, or under the eaves of a building; thatch of reed or palm leaves is also used. Birds often roost in palm crowns and under roofs.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Resident on Trinidad and on Tobago, where it has bred since the 1960s. A few isolated records come from Grenada, Barbados and Bonaire. Outside the region from Nicaragua through Central America and most of tropical South America east of the Andes to Bolivia, Paraguay and southern Brazil.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Palms in gardens, hotel grounds and villages on Trinidad and Tobago are the place to look; the birds climb along the midribs and hang from the leaf tips. At lodges in the Northern Range, such as in the Arima Valley, they also roost and nest under roofs.
Conservation status
Not threatened. A common species that has adapted well to man-made landscapes with gardens and plantations.
Scientific name
Thraupis palmarum | (Wied-Neuwied, 1821)
Wied-Neuwied described the species in 1821 as Tanagra palmarum; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Thraupis was introduced in 1826 by Boie. Thraupis is the Ancient Greek word for an unidentified small bird mentioned by Aristotle. palmarum is Latin for 'of the palms', after the bird's fondness for palm trees. The specimen the first description was based on came from Canavieiras, Bahia, Brazil.