The Story
This is a Green-and-black Fruiteater (Pipreola riefferii) that I photographed at the Río Blanco reserve near Manizales, Caldas, Colombia on June 24, 2017. It often joins mixed-species feeding flocks. It plucks fruit while perched or while hovering briefly after a short flight. It is a cotinga with green upperparts and yellow underparts streaked with black, and males have a black head. The Río Blanco reserve covers 4,932 hectares of cloud forest on the Central Andes, about 3 kilometers northeast of Manizales.
I photographed it with a Canon EOS 70D and the EF400mm f/5.6L USM, at 1/1000 sec, f/6.3, ISO 1250. IUCN lists the Green-and-black Fruiteater as Least Concern with a decreasing population, and BirdLife International lists Río Blanco as an Important Bird Area, protected because its forest supplies about a third of the drinking water of Manizales.
©2020 Adam Rainoff Photographer
The bird
The Green-and-black Fruiteater (Pipreola riefferii) belongs to the family Cotingidae (Cotingas) 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 decreasing. Source: IUCN Red List