Chlorospingus flavopectus

This little bird is the Common Chlorospingus; crazy name right? It used to be known as the Common Bush-Tanager but not long ago the taxonomists decided they had enough evidence to support moving the bush tanagers from the tanager family to the sparrow family. When this happened it was decided to just use the Latin name to replace the bush tanager part of the name. I personally think chlorospingus is a bit of a mouth full and would have preferred something a little more familiar but oh well. The new name did make me curious about what chlorospingus means. I know chloro comes from the Greek for the color of chlorine (a pale yellow-green color) but had no idea what spingus means. After poking around a bit it looks like it comes from the Greek word for finch. So this is the common green finch! This individual was seen on our October Costa Rica trip up in the mountains outside of a restaurant where we were trying to have lunch. Eating turned out to be challenging on this trip because there always seemed to be some bird or birds to distract us from our food. Good problem to have right?

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