The Story
The place
Caracolí Bird House, Villavicencio, Meta, Colombia. I photographed this Silver-beaked Tanager here on September 15, 2025, at about 6:59 a.m.
eBird lists 94 species all-time at Caracolí Bird House (as of October 2026).
The shot
This Silver-beaked Tanager (Ramphocelus carbo), a female or young bird, paused on a lichen-covered branch at Caracolí Bird House, a rural birding lodge in the vereda Zuria outside Villavicencio, in Meta, Colombia. Adult females have a dark rusty-red head and back, and immature birds look like them, unlike the deep crimson-black adult males. Where its diet has been studied, it eats about equal amounts of animal and plant food, mostly arthropods and fruit.
I photographed it from about 10 meters with a Canon R5 and the RF 800mm f/11 plus the RF 1.4x extender, at 1/45 sec, f/16, ISO 1600, +0.5 EV. IUCN lists the Silver-beaked Tanager as Least Concern, and it is found across most of northern and central South America east of the Andes.
©2026 Adam Rainoff Photographer
The bird
The Silver-beaked Tanager (Ramphocelus carbo) belongs to the family Thraupidae (Tanagers and Allies) in the eBird/Clements taxonomy.
Source: eBird.org (opens in a new tab)
Conservation
Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (assessment published 2024), with the population trend listed as stable. Source: IUCN Red List
