Not to be confused with the Silver-backedTanager or the Silver-beakedTanager, The Silver-throatedTanager is a bird of the highlands of Costa Rica and Panama and the cloud forests of the northern and central Andes in South America. The bird’s plumage is unusual beyond the silver throat. Not many Tangaraspecies – the largest genus of Tanagers – have striping or barring, let alone a black line around  that fancy silvery bib. In  the tropics, where the variety of bird species can be bewildering, this bird is unmistakeable. There’s nothing like it. There are three subspecies; these first two are probably icterocephala, the southernmost….

Don’t confuse the Flame-coloredTanager with the Flame-crested Tanagerfeatured a couple of weeks ago. Yes, the names are confusingly similar, but the birds certainly are not. The male is to the left; the badly out-of-focus bird to the right is the female. This tanager is different from the last sixteen or so in a couple of ways. First, this is the first tanager that sometimes occurs in the United States. It’s rare, but it has been seen several times in southern Arizona and west Texas. The regular range is northern Mexico to western Panama. The second difference is that ornithologists are unsure…

Hey… Where is this thing going? As several journalists have pointed out – August is supposed to be a slow news month. But like many other things in Alaska, that’s been turned on its head. The Dunleavy steamroller is juiced up and going full speed. And so is the recall effort. Almost 40,000 signatures have been gathered so far in the first phase of the recall which will draw to a close on September 2. Phase 2 will come after the application is approved, and will require over 70,000 signatures (which looks extremely do-able at this point), and then after…

Not everyone agrees that the Lemon-rumped Tanager is a species. The International Ornithological Congress does; that’s the world bird list that WC follows. The folks over at Clements think it is a subspecies of the Flame-rumped Tanager. Not to be confused with the Flame-coloredTanager, a completely different species. There was a failure of imagination in the naming of some tanager species. But either way the Lemon-rumped Tanager is a handsome bird. Jet black, with a brilliant lemon yellow rump, it is unmistakeable when you see it. The species – subspecies, if you prefer – ranges from Central America to southern…

Gov. Mike Dunleavy didn’t come out and call it “fake news” but he may as well have. In his journey down the Trump copycat trail, he’s now blaming the media as a convenient excuse to not have to answer uncomfortable questions. Here’s the headline that got the governor’s nose out of joint. He said it was inaccurate. He would have preferred a headline that read: “The legislature chose that $1600 value of the Permanent Fund Dividend and he decided not to veto it.” And for the want of that awkward headline, he’s decided not to talk to the press anymore….

The White-shouldered Tanager is a close cousin to the White-lined Tanager featured here two weeks ago. It’s distinguished from its cousin by the much larger, white shoulder patches instead of the thin, sometimes invisible, white wing lines. The White-shouldered often shows a bit more purplish iridescence in its black than does the White-lined. Like the White-lined, this species is strongly sexually dimorphic. Females are yellow with a gray face. Or so WC has been told; WC has never seen one. White-shouldered Tanagers have a wide distribution, from Honduras in the north to central Brazil in the south and from the…

TALL TALES from Juneau Eyes on the Dunleavy Disaster ABOUT FACE!     THE GOVERNOR LAST WEEK THE GOVERNOR TODAY A CONVERSATION Remember the “unapologetic” governor, who two weeks ago all but assured us he’d re-veto his terrible budget cuts despite thousands of Alaskans showing up to testify, writing, and calling to oppose them?  Apparently, he doesn’t exist anymore. The shiny new governor that made an appearance this week is now furiously walking back everything he’s said about how necessary these cuts are and how everyone knew exactly that this would happen when they voted for him. SPOILER: Neither of…

Back in early May, when the Bird of the Week shifted to Tanagers, WC warned that there were dozens of species. Here’s the fifteenth. This is a species WC has only seen one time; it’s a canopy dweller, spending most of its time in the upper canopy, a hundred feet or more over the heads of would-be birders. A birder can get around that problem by visiting a canopy tower, a platform that takes you up into the tops of the trees (after a hot, sweaty climb of hundreds of steps, of course). Sometimes, as here, there are as many…