Tag: american bird conservancy

Teetering, bobbing, and darting along the water’s edge or springing into shallow, stiff-winged flight with a soft weet-weet-weet call, the Spotted Sandpiper is a distinctive and delightful sight. During its breeding season this bird shows a densely-spotted throat and breast (reminiscent of a Wood Thrush’s), a black-tipped orange bill, brown back, and white eyebrow, or supercilium, that extends behind the eye. Even without its eponymous spots, which are absent during the nonbreeding season, the Spotted Sandpiper’s telltale foraging behaviors and flight style make it easy to identify.

The “Spotty” is

Named for the Bolivian city adjacent to the mountain slopes that comprise its stronghold, the rare and beautiful Cochabamba Mountain Finch is actually more closely related to a tanager than to a finch. This sparrow-sized bird is a member of the Poospiza genus (warbling finches/mountain finches) and is distinguished by its distinct plumage and highly limited range around the city of Cochabamba in Bolivia.

Many geographically restricted species throughout South America are named after “their” places in this way. Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, an isolated mountain range along

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