At Tinamu Reserve, in Caldas Department, Colombia, about 1.5 hours from Manizales, our guide the second day was Fernando. One birder, from California, who leads birding tours to Colombia, told me that Fernando was by far the best birder at Tinamu. Fernando speaks Spanish with very limited English. He brought in a female to help him because she spoke pretty good English, and I suspect she was a girlfriend. We loved her because she was very friendly and helped the communication tremendously. In the afternoon we took a walk down the road to the main road to Tinamu. After we went down most of the elevation gain, where it leveled out, Fernando spotted some brown-throated parakeets.
The brown-throated parakeet has 14 subspecies which are highly variable in coloration. They range from Costa Rica in the north, through Panama, northern portions of South America, and islands off the northern South American coast, such as Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire.
Birds of the World describes the nominate subspecies as having "primarily green upperparts, with a yellow chin, face and forehead, a dull olive breast, a grass green belly with an orange patch and blue on the flight feathers and edges of its tail." I believe the subspecies we saw was aeruginosa, which it describes as mixing brown on the yellow face and with a buff forehead.
They must have been fairly far off. I never found them in the foliage.
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