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Yellow-throated Vireo | Vireo flavifrons
Geelborstvireo | Vireo garganta amarilla
The Yellow-throated Vireo is a sturdy vireo with a bright yellow throat and breast and yellow spectacles. It breeds in eastern North America and is a winter visitor and passage migrant in the guide area, often moving through the canopy with mixed flocks.
Voice
The song is a slow series of hoarse, short phrases of two or three notes with pauses in between. In winter mainly a harsh, descending chatter.
Recording: Scott Gravette — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
13–15 cm. Head and back olive-green, rump grey. Throat and breast bright yellow, belly and undertail coverts white. Yellow lores and eye-ring form yellow spectacles. Two broad white wing bars. Bill fairly thick and grey, legs bluish grey.
Confusion species
Blue-headed Vireo Vireo solitarius has a blue-grey head with white spectacles and a white throat. Yellow-winged Vireo Vireo carmioli (highlands of Costa Rica and western Panama) is smaller, with yellow wing bars and no bright yellow throat. Yellow-green Vireo Vireo flavoviridis lacks wing bars and has a grey crown with a white eyebrow.
Habitat
In winter in the canopy and at the edges of humid and semi-humid forest, secondary forest, shade coffee and trees in semi-open country, mainly in the lowlands and foothills. It forages deliberately among the foliage for insects and in winter also eats fruit.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
Winters from southern Mexico through all of Central America to Panama, and on into northern South America. In spring and autumn it migrates mainly through eastern Mexico. Breeds outside the guide area in the eastern United States and south-eastern Canada.
- Winter visitor (c. Oct–Mar)
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In winter best found in mixed flocks in the treetops along forest edges, where the yellow throat and white wing bars stand out.
Conservation status
Not threatened. A fairly common winter visitor in much of Central America.
Scientific name
Vireo flavifrons | Vieillot, 1808
Vieillot described the species in 1808 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. He introduced the genus Vireo in that same work. Vireo was used by Latin authors for a small, green, migratory bird, probably the Eurasian golden oriole, though the European greenfinch has also been suggested. flavifrons is Latin, from flavus 'yellow' and frons 'forehead', after the yellow forehead and throat. The specimen the first description was based on came from eastern United States.