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Swallow Tanager | Tersina viridis
Zwaluwtangare | Tangara golondrina
The Swallow Tanager is an aberrant tanager with a broad, flat bill and long, pointed wings. It catches many insects in flight from a high bare branch, but also eats fruit. Unusually for a tanager it nests in cavities, often in a steep earth bank. On Trinidad it is a local breeding bird that disappears for part of the year.
Voice
The call is a high, slightly blurred, buzzy and metallic tseet, heard more often than the song. The song is a fairly rapid series of ten to fifteen high, squeaky notes.
Recording: Jacob Wijpkema — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
14–15 cm, with a short, broad bill and long wings. The male is bright turquoise-blue with a black mask from the forehead to the throat; the centre of the breast and belly and the undertail coverts are white, the flanks coarsely barred black. Wings and tail are black with turquoise edges. The female is grass-green, with a greyish, dark-mottled face, a pale yellow belly and yellowish flanks barred with green. Young males start green like the female and gradually become patchily blue.
Confusion species
Turquoise Tanager Tangara mexicana is darker blue with a yellow belly and no mask. Female Green Honeycreeper Chlorophanes spiza is also grass-green, but has a thin, slightly curved bill with a yellow lower mandible and no barring on the flanks. Females of Purple Honeycreeper Cyanerpes caeruleus and Red-legged Honeycreeper Cyanerpes cyaneus are smaller, with a long, curved bill and streaked underparts.
Habitat
Edges of moist forest, clearings with scattered trees, mature second growth and shaded coffee and cacao plantations, on Trinidad mainly in the hills and mountains of the Northern Range. It often perches upright on high bare branches, from which it sallies for flying insects; it also plucks fruit, often with a brief hover. The nest is in a cavity in an earth bank, a wall or a tree, usually an existing hole; in soft soil it also digs its own.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation types of the Caribbean.
Range and movements
Within the Caribbean only on Trinidad, where it breeds locally, mainly in the Northern Range. From November to January there are hardly any records there. There are a few isolated reports from Curaçao and Bonaire. Outside the region from eastern Panama through much of South America to north-eastern Argentina; southern populations move north in the austral winter.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Best looked for in spring and early summer along mountain roads in the Northern Range, for example in the Arima Valley, where birds perch on bare branches above the forest and sally out for insects. Steep roadside banks are worth checking for nest holes.
Conservation status
Not threatened. A widespread species of forest edges and semi-open country that also occurs in second growth and plantations.
Scientific name
Tersina viridis | (Illiger, 1811)
Illiger described the species in 1811 as Hirundo viridis; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Tersina was introduced in 1819 by Vieillot. Tersina comes from the French Tersine, an unidentified bird described by Buffon. viridis is Latin for 'green'. The specimen the first description was based on came from eastern Brazil.