Hi, everyone.  Our bird this week is the turquoise tanager.  I believe we covered the very literally named multicolored tanager in an earlier header.  This bird is very pretty, and I wanted to share even though I wasn’t able to find a whole lot of info about it.  Not even enough to come up with a silly title for the week.  Nevertheless, here we go.  The turquoise tanager is a medium sized bird, adults are 14 cm (5.5 in) long and weigh 20 g (about .7oz).  They live in a big chunk of South America, including Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.  It prefers humid forest, so it is mostly limited to the Amazon within its range.  The bird is social, and will often forage in groups of five to 15, eating fruit as well as insects and other arthropods it finds on tree branches.  Nests are built in a tree or shrub, and the female incubates three eggs per mating season.  The turquoise tanager is not considered threatened, although its eggs are eaten by snakes and other oviraptors.  I did find one source that said that tree cover had reduced by 5% across the bird’s range lately, but there is no hard data as of yet that this has led to a decrease in population.  There are four recognized subspecies and a previous subspecies, the white-bellied tanager, has been recently officially recognized as its own species. I stumbled on a list of tropical birds of the western hemisphere I planned to cover, but if there is so little research close at hand I might have to turn elsewhere for inspiration. Or these headers might be a little briefer for a while, with more of an emphasis on images. When the news gets scary, as it seems to be every day, remember to look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. There is good to be done, hope to be had, and beautiful nature in the WPT.

Links: https://tinyurl.com/mr7ndtt9, https://tinyurl.com/5n8sfa52, https://tinyurl.com/4636zwbv, https://tinyurl.com/3bavvsnb, https://tinyurl.com/4636zwbv