my best tanager pics ever

We continued from Paraiso to another highland restaurant, this one that had a feeder set-up that frequently attracted Flame-colored Tanagers.  It took all of about 2 minutes for one to appear.  The lighting was just about perfect with afternoon light behind us muted somewhat by the mountains.

There were a number of natural appearing perches made available for the birds.

There were at least 3 different pairs of the birds, here's the female.

At one point one of the males seemed to either yawn or attempt to gack up a pellet.

There were other birds coming in to.  One of the more attractive was a Yellow-thighed finch, a Chiriqui highland endemic (a lot of the birds in this area fell into this category).

A little less attractive is another variation on a towhee theme, the BFFF, otherwise known as the Large-footed Finch.

Sooty-capped Bush-tanagers were common highland birds, they seemed to frequently go by the name "there's something."

It's eating rice out of a feeder constructed from a hubcap (what else?)

Acorn woodpeckers were the most common highland woodpecker.  I'd never before noticed the little fleck of red at the upper breast.  I'm not totally convinced that American birds have this, but I haven't googled any pics either.

Mountain Elaenias, Slaty Flowerpiercer, a heard-only Emerald Toucanet (more later), a de-tailed rufous-collared sparrow (undoubtedly courtesy of one of the feral cats stalking about), Mountain and Sooty Robin, and surely others worked the area as well.  This was the only place though that we had good looks at male Flame-coloreds, but good looks they were.

Hopefully my computer gets off the fritz by the next post, the formatting seems all weird on the one I'm working on now...