Puerto Rican tanager | Nesospingidae

Puerto Ricotangare | Llorosa

This family contains a single species, the Puerto Rican Tanager, found only on Puerto Rico. The species was long treated as a tanager, but on the basis of genetic research it has been placed in a family of its own, which belongs to a small group of Caribbean songbird families. It is a bird of about eighteen centimetres with olive-brown upperparts, a darker head, dull white underparts with faint brownish streaks on the breast, and a small white patch on the wing, to which the scientific name speculiferus refers. Male and female look alike. The species lives in humid montane forest and mid-elevation forest in the island's mountain ranges, where it is often common. Puerto Rican Tanagers move through the forest in noisy groups and frequently form the core of mixed flocks of songbirds. They eat fruit, seeds and insects, which they search for at all levels of the forest. The call is a dry, harsh chatter. The nest is an open cup in a tree or shrub.