New Peruvian bird discovered: The vivid yellow Inti tanager [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

NOVEMBER 11, 2021

by Sarah White, San Diego State University



The Inti tanager. Credit: Ryan Terrill

After persuading his parents to bring home a bird feeder from his relatives' hardware store, Kevin Burns became captivated by watching his avian visitors. He would flip through pages in a bulky encyclopedia to know which kind of bird was flitting about.

Now an ornithologist and professor of biology at San Diego State University, Burns's childhood fascination led him and his collaborators to identify a new bird, Heliothraupis oneilli, not previously described in any field guide.

The bird's common name, the Inti tanager, is named after the word for sun in Quechua, the Indigenous language of the tropical mountainous area it inhabits, befitting of its vivid yellow feathers and tendency to sing during midday.

Burns's colleagues from Louisiana State University first spotted the bird while leading a birdwatching tour over twenty years ago, in the foothills of the Andes mountains in Peru. But they were not able to collect enough genetic material to analyze until 2011 when they found additional Inti tanagers breeding in nearby Bolivia during the rainy season.

More:
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-peruvian-bird-vivid-yellow-inti.html