Flame-rumped Tanager

How to find it

Finding one in Costa Rica would be a matter of luck. The 2017 female was on a small farm and did not visit the feeder. It stayed on the far side of the property near the forest edge. It appeared when the group of tanagers arrived, squeaking and sputtering. Check any yellow-bodied female tanager flock in the San Vito area carefully. Listen for chatter and a loud nasal 'chink', and look over fruiting shrubs.

How to recognise it

The bright yellow rump of the Costa Rican form is unmistakable. The bird near Panama and Costa Rica is the yellow-rumped icteronotus type, also called Lemon-rumped Tanager.

Across the species' range, males are mostly velvety black with a pale bluish bill that has a dark tip. The rump is yellow in icteronotus and red in the nominate subspecies. In the red form the patch covers the lower back, rump and upper tail coverts and is bright scarlet.

Females, like the 2017 bird, are mostly yellow below with a blackish-brown head, wings and tail. Length is about 18 cm.

What it sounds like

Recording: Zac Peterson, CC BY 4.0, source, read 4 Nov 2026.

Behaviour and diet

Across its range, the yellow-rumped form often lives in noisy groups of pairs, families or six or more birds. They spend much of their time calling from thickets and shrubs or visiting small fruiting trees.

Pairs or small groups forage at several heights in the vegetation. They sometimes sit for long periods on high perches, especially near dusk. These are range-wide habits, since Costa Rica has so few records.

Where it lives

Range-wide, this tanager lives at the edges of lowland evergreen forest, in secondary forest and in second-growth scrub.

The yellow-rumped icteronotus form lives at low to middle elevations, from sea level to about 1,400 m, along the Pacific side from Peru to Costa Rica. In Costa Rica the accepted record comes from a small farm in the San Vito area of Puntarenas, near the Panama border. Costa Rica sits just north of the normal range.

When to see it

The single accepted bird stayed from late September to the end of October 2017, and some birders searched for it after it was found.

Similar birds

The red-rumped form looks much like Passerini's Tanager and Cherrie's Tanager, but its red is more scarlet, less deep, and reaches farther up the back. The 2017 female travelled with a local group of Cherrie's Tanagers, called sargentos locally. Voice can help, because Passerini's sings more slurred, melodious phrases than the yellow-rumped form.

Names and lore in Costa Rica

The Costa Rican Spanish name is Tangara Flamígera, and in Panama it is called Tangara Lomiflama. In English it is also called Lemon-rumped or Yellow-rumped Tanager. Some authorities split it as R. icteronotus, but the Costa Rican list follows the checklist that lumps them as Flame-rumped Tanager.

Status and conservation

The official Costa Rican list marks it as accidental, and the 2025-2026 list still shows A? with a question mark, while the IUCN rates the combined species as Least Concern.

Photography tips

Banana feeders at rural houses in Colombia draw this tanager, giving close views. In Costa Rica the 2017 bird ignored the feeder, so watch the forest edge when a tanager flock arrives.