ORANGE BIRDS SEEN IN NORTH AMERICA

Altamira Oriole

SCIENTIFIC NAME: Icterus Gularis 

Males and females are brilliant orange and black, brightest in the face. They have black in front of the eye and on the chin, a black back, tail, and wings, with a white wingbar and orange shoulder.

Immatures are yellowish orange, with an olive brown back and without the orange shoulder mark.

Juveniles have a yellow head and body, olive back, and lack the wing markings and dark face and chin markings.

BILL: black, fairly long and sharply pointed.

SIZE: large songbird, measuring 8.3 - 9.8 inches in length, with a wingspan of 14.2 inches.

WEIGHT: weighs about 47 - 64 grams.

COLOR: orange, black, white and olive.

Insects, fruit and nectar; also seeds and nuts.

Forages and nests in lightly wooded areas, parks, wildlife refuges, farms, orchards, thorn forests, and riparian areas.

Subtropical lowlands of the Mexican Gulf Coasts and northern Central America, and also in the extreme south of Texas.

SONG: A series of clear, varied, but hesitant whistles, sometimes interspersed with harsh notes as rasping chatter which may signal alarm.

CALL: Contact call is a nasal, raspy “ike-ike-ike”. The alarm call by female is a harsh “keeeer” when the predator approaches.

NEST: The females weave a long, hanging pear-shaped bag nests, attaching them to the tips of high branches or sometimes from utility wires. The entrance to the nest is at the top.

It is made with vines, palm frond strips, grasses, flax, bark strips, hair, and roots of epiphytes. It is lined with plant down, straw, hair, or feathers.

EGGS: 2 - 6 pale bluish-white eggs with irregular black and purple spots and splotches.

They are forage gleaners, searching for food through the tree-tops to the near-ground bottom of the tree.

SOURCES:
https://www.birds-of-north-america.net
https://en.wikipedia.org
https://www.allaboutbirds.org
http://www.oiseaux-birds.com