Return of Bird of the Week: Golden Tanager

Okay, we’ve had a drab – well, subtle – Palm Tanager. We’ve had a ridiculously colorful Paradise Tanager. Let’s go back to a merely colorful tanager, this time the Golden Tanager. The Golden Tanager is distributed from northern Venezuela to southern Peru, with at least nine subspecies scattered across that range. It’s a bright, golden bird, with blue and yellow in its wings. You can see the much smaller black auricular patch, and the very different coloration in the wing in this subspecies. This might be the most variable of the tanager species WC has encountered. Golden Tanagers are about averaged-sized for…