They look like canaries, don’t they?
In Spanish the yellow ones are indeed called canaries “Canario,” yet all three are in the tanager family (Thraupidae), the second largest family of birds in the world.
Barloventomagico photographed them at El Cedral Ranch in southern Venezuela on December 30. Here’s who they are from left to right: Spanish, (Scientific name), English:
- Canario chirigüe, (Sicalis luteola), Grassland Yellow-Finch
- Canario de sabana, (Sicalis columbiana), Orange-fronted Yellow-Finch
- Azulejo verdeviche, (Thraupis glaucocolpa), Glaucous Tanager
Though they’re tanagers they aren’t related to ours at all. Our familiar scarlet, summer, western and hepatic tanagers (Piranga) are now in the Cardinal family (Cardinalidae).
What a confusion of names!
(photos by barloventomagico via Flickr, Creative Commons license. Click on the image to see the original.)
p.s. A special shout out to Dr. Tony Bledsoe at the University of Pittsburgh! His work on Sicalis DNA in the late 1980s proved that Sicalis are tanagers — published in The Auk (105: 504-515) in July 1988 as: Nuclear DNA Evolution And Phylogeny of The New World Nine-Primaried Oscines.
The common name of Glaucous Tanager is surprising me because Glaucous Gulls are mostly white but this bird is a beautiful blue.
Trinidad, glaucous actually means (primary definition): “of a dull grayish-green or blue color.” So now the question is, why is the gull named that way?