The Story
The place
Caracolí Bird House, Villavicencio, Meta, Colombia. I photographed this Blue-gray Tanager here on September 15, 2025, at about 6:58 a.m.
eBird lists 94 species all-time at Caracolí Bird House (as of October 2026).
The shot
This Blue-gray Tanager (Thraupis episcopus) paused among green stems at Caracolí Bird House, a rural birding lodge in the vereda Zuria outside Villavicencio, in Meta, Colombia, with white edging visible on its turquoise wings. Its breeding habitat is open woodland, farmland and gardens, and it lives mainly on fruit, also taking some nectar, insects and other arthropods. It lays one to three eggs, usually two, in a deep cup nest placed in a high tree fork or a crevice in a building. IUCN lists it as Least Concern.
I made this frame from about 7.5 meters with a Canon R5 and the RF 800mm f/11 plus the RF 1.4x extender, at 1/60 sec, f/16, ISO 1600, −0.5 EV. The lodge is a public eBird hotspot, so the birds seen there go into a shared record that anyone can use.
©2026 Adam Rainoff Photographer
The bird
The Blue-gray Tanager (Thraupis episcopus) 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 2021), with the population trend listed as increasing. Source: IUCN Red List
