White-throated Sierra-Finch

About the White-throated Sierra-Finch

The white-throated sierra finch (Idiopsar erythronotus) is a species of tanager found in high-elevation Puna grassland habitat across the Altiplano of Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. The white-throated sierra finch was described as Chlorospiza erythronota by Rodolfo Amando Philippi and Christian Ludwig Landbeck in 1861. The type specimen, an immature (initially identified as an adult), was collected near Putre in modern Parinacota Province, Chile (then Peru). The species was redescribed by Anton Reichenow in 1907, on the basis of an adult male specimen in the Berlin Museum of Natural History, as Diuca behni, after the zoologist Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Behn. Carl Eduard Hellmayr recognized D. behni as a junior synonym of C. erythronota in 1932, transferring the species (which he named "Behn's finch" to the genus Phrygilus, where it remained for many decades.

As with many neotropical "finches," the white-throated sierra finch is not a true finch, but instead belongs to the tanager family (Thraupidae). In 2014, a large molecular phylogenetic study of the tanagers found Phrygilus to be polyphyletic, with the two "gray-and-white" sierra finches (white-throated... Wikipedia →