Flame-rumped Tanager

About the Flame-rumped Tanager

The flame-rumped tanager (Ramphocelus flammigerus) is a passerine bird in the family Thraupidae, the tanagers and allies. It is found from Panama to Peru. Its two subspecies have at times been treated as full species. The flame-rumped tanager was formally described in 1833 by the English naturalists William Jardine and Prideaux John Selby based on a specimen collected on "some part of the district upon the Columbia River". They assigned the binomial name Ramphopis flamigerus, whose specific epithet is a misspelling of the Latin word flammigerus meaning "flame-bearing" or "fiery". It is now one of eight species in the genus Ramphocelus that was introduced in 1805 by the French zoologist Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest.

The flame-rumped tanager has two subspecies, the nominate R. f. flammigerus (Jardine, W & Selby, PJ, 1833) and R. f. icteronotus (Bonaparte, CLJL, 1838). For much of the twentieth century subspecies R. f. icteronotus was treated as a separate species, the lemon-rumped tanager. A study published in 2017 found very little genetic differentiation. BirdLife International's Handbook of the Birds of the World lumped the two taxa in 2024. The Clements... Wikipedia →