Category: Birdwatching

A common, confiding, and conspicuous member of the tanager family, the bright blue Masked Flowerpiercer is a familiar sight to birders throughout the Andes. This bird is named for its feeding habits, which are made possible by its highly specialized bill.

Like other flowerpiercers, the Masked Flowerpiercer has a slightly upturned bill with a hooked upper mandible and a shorter, sharp lower mandible used to pierce the base of flowers to access the nectar inside. Its genus name, Diglossa, derives from the Greek word for “double-tongued” and refers to this

A flock of pink flamingos atop a mountain sounds like some sort of weird hallucination … After all, don’t these long-legged wading birds live in low-lying wetlands, like the American Flamingo?

Incredibly, there are three flamingo species that make their homes high in the Andes Mountains of South America: the Andean, Chilean, and James’s Flamingos. The James’s Flamingo is the smallest and rarest of these, and was first described to science from Chile in 1886. Also known as the Puna Flamingo in recognition of its high-altitude habitat, the James’s Flamingo