The Story
This is a Bare-faced Ibis (Phimosus infuscatus) that I photographed at the Malecón Cameguadua in Chinchiná, Caldas, Colombia on June 23, 2017. It lives in open places such as wet meadows, savannas, marshes and rice fields. It is usually seen in flocks, with its own kind or other ibises, and sometimes with domestic animals. It is called the bare-faced ibis because it has no feathers on its face, which is usually reddish. The reservoir sits at about 1,370 meters and has two lakes, with the tourist boardwalk, the malecón, on the northern one.
I photographed it with a Canon EOS 70D and the EF400mm f/5.6L USM, at 1/1000 sec, f/5.6, ISO 1600. IUCN lists the Bare-faced Ibis as Least Concern with a stable population, and Chinchiná is part of the Coffee Cultural Landscape of Colombia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2011.
©2018 Adam Rainoff Photographer
The bird
The Bare-faced Ibis (Phimosus infuscatus) belongs to the family Threskiornithidae (Ibises and Spoonbills) in the eBird/Clements taxonomy.
Source: eBird.org (opens in a new tab)
Conservation
Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (assessment published 2025), with the population trend listed as stable. Source: IUCN Red List