The Story
I photographed this Ruddy-breasted Seedeater (Sporophila minuta) near El Rosario, in the Patía valley of Nariño, Colombia. It belongs to the tanager family and lives in dry savanna, seasonally wet grassland and degraded former forest, from Mexico to northern South America. Its range runs through Mexico, every Central American country except Belize, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, the Guianas and Trinidad and Tobago. Like other Sporophila seedeaters, it has a stubby, conical bill adapted for feeding on seeds, and in most species of the genus the sexes look strikingly different. IUCN lists it as Least Concern.
I used a Canon R5 with the RF 800mm f/11 plus the RF 1.4x extender for this one, at 1/500 sec, f/16, ISO 1600. In 2018, bird monitoring by the Humboldt Institute in the dry forests of Mercaderes, Taminango and El Rosario recorded 80 species.
©2022 Adam Rainoff Photographer
The bird
The Ruddy-breasted Seedeater (Sporophila minuta) 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 decreasing. Source: IUCN Red List