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Emerald Tanager | Tangara florida
Smaragdtangare | Tangara esmeralda
The Emerald Tanager is a small, bright emerald-green tanager with a yellow crown and a black patch behind the eye that lives in the canopy of wet foothill forest. It travels with mixed flocks of tanagers and often searches mossy branches for insects. In the guide area it occurs on the Caribbean slope of Costa Rica and in Panama.
Voice
The calls are high, sharp and rather hard tsit and chip notes. The song is little known.
Recording: Jonas Nilsson — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
12–13 cm. Male: bright emerald green, with a yellow crown and a square black patch on the ear coverts; lores black. Back green with black streaks. Centre of the belly yellowish. Wings and tail black with green edges. Female like the male, but with a green rather than yellow crown.
Confusion species
Silver-throated Tanager Tangara icterocephala is mainly yellow with a silvery-white throat and a black malar stripe. Speckled Tanager Ixothraupis guttata is green with black spots on the head and breast and no black ear patch. Female Viridian Dacnis Dacnis viguieri and other green dacnises lack the black ear patch and the streaked back.
Habitat
Canopy and edges of very wet, mossy foothill forest, locally also lowland forest, roughly between 300 and 1200 m, mainly between 500 and 1000 m. It forages in pairs or small groups, almost always with mixed flocks. It eats fruit and insects, which it searches for on mossy branches while hanging and twisting.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
Caribbean slope of Costa Rica, mainly from the Cordillera Central south-eastwards; in Panama on the Caribbean slope and locally on both slopes to Darién. Outside the guide area in western Colombia and north-western Ecuador.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Regularly seen in the Quebrada González sector of Braulio Carrillo and at Rara Avis in Costa Rica, usually in mixed flocks with Silver-throated Tanager and other tanagers.
Conservation status
Not threatened (LC). Fairly common in continuous wet foothill forest; disappears where this forest is cleared.
Scientific name
Tangara florida | (Sclater & Salvin, 1869)
Sclater & Salvin described the species in 1869 as Calliste florida; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Tangara was introduced in 1760 by Brisson. Tangara is a Tupi name from Brazil, often explained as 'dancer', for a brightly coloured bird. florida is Latin for 'flowery, splendid', after the brilliant green and yellow plumage. The specimen the first description was based on came from Costa Rica.