Yellow Oriole

Long tailed and rather plain parakeet endemic to Colombia’s Santa Marta Mountains. The thick, white eye ring and red blotches on face and breast are its best features. Blue and red in wings is mostly concealed with the bird is perched. Typically encountered in small flocks that fly from tree to tree in the cloud forest, screeching loudly. Regularly seen along the San Lorenzo Ridge in El Dorado Nature Reserve, where nest boxes have been placed to improve its breeding success. Also nests and roosts in dead palm trees.

Snappy-looking male is black with a white throat and yellow belly. Two black patches on either side of the chest give him a “vested” appearance. Female is soft brown above with a darker tail and wingtips, and a pale-yellow belly which blends gradually into the breast. The female also has a vest, but it is fainter and less eye-catching than the male’s. Found from lower foothills up into montane areas, where it inhabits open areas with tall growth, particularly edges and clearings. Like other flowerpeckers, favors mistletoe.

A slender tern with a short bill. Breeding adults are dark-capped with an ashy-gray body, a strongly contrasting white cheek stripe and rump, and a reddish bill and legs. In flight, underwings and uppertail are mostly grayish. In non-breeding plumage resembles other non-breeding terns, but note structure. Restricted to a handful of subantarctic islands, where it forages in inshore waters; common on Kerguelen and uncommon on Crozet and Marion. In breeding plumage, the larger Antarctic Tern is paler gray than Kerguelen, with a larger bill and whitish (not grayish) uppertail and underwings. Arctic Terns (in non-breeding plumage) only overlap with Kerguelen Terns (in breeding plumage) in austral summer.