The Sooty-capped Bush-Tanager, Chlorospingus pileatus, is a small passerine

Passerine

A passerine is a bird of the order Passeriformes, which includes more than half of all bird species. Sometimes known as perching birds or, less accurately, as songbirds, the passerines form one of the most diverse terrestrial vertebrate orders: with over 5,000 identified species, it has roughly...

 bird

Bird

Birds are feathered, winged, bipedal, endothermic , egg-laying, vertebrate animals. Around 10,000 living species and 188 families makes them the most speciose class of tetrapod vertebrates. They inhabit ecosystems across the globe, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. Extant birds range in size from...

. This tanager

Tanager

The tanagers comprise the bird family Thraupidae, in the order Passeriformes. The family has an American distribution.There were traditionally about 240 species of tanagers, but the taxonomic treatment of this family's members is currently in a state of flux...

 is an endemic resident breeder in the highlands of Costa Rica

Costa Rica

Costa Rica , officially the Republic of Costa Rica is a multilingual, multiethnic and multicultural country in Central America, bordered by Nicaragua to the north, Panama to the southeast, the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Caribbean Sea to the east....

 and western Panama

Panama

Panama , officially the Republic of Panama , is the southernmost country of Central America. Situated on the isthmus connecting North and South America, it is bordered by Costa Rica to the northwest, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The...

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The Sooty-capped Bush-Tanager is found in mossy mountain forests, second growth and adjacent bushy clearings, typically from 1600 m altitude to above the timberline. The bulky cup nest is built on bank, in a dense bush, or hidden amongst epiphyte

Epiphyte

An epiphyte is a plant that grows upon another plant non-parasitically or sometimes upon some other object , derives its moisture and nutrients from the air and rain and sometimes from debris accumulating around it, and is found in the temperate zone and in the...

s up to 11 m high in a tree. The normal clutch is two pink-brown marked white eggs.

The adult Sooty-capped Bush-Tanager is 13.5 cm long and weighs 20g. The adult has a blackish head with a white supercilium and a grey throat. It has olive upperparts and yellow underparts, becoming white on the belly. Some individuals in the Irazu-Turrialba area are greyer and lack yellow in the underparts. Immatures are browner-headed, duller below, and have a duller olive-tinged supercilium. This species is easily distinguished from Common Bush-Tanager

Common Bush-Tanager

The Common Bush-tanager is a small passerine bird. It is a resident breeder in the highlands from central Mexico south to Bolivia and northwest Argentina. C. ophthalmicus in the loose sense is a notorious cryptic species complex, and several of the up to 25 subspecies recognized in recent times...

 by its blacker head and obvious supercilium.

Sooty-capped Bush-Tanagers occur in small groups, or as part of a mixed-species feeding flock

Mixed-species feeding flock

A mixed-species feeding flock, also termed a mixed-species foraging flock, mixed hunting party or informally bird wave, is a flock of usually insectivorous birds of different species, that join each other and move together while foraging...

. This species feeds on insect

Insect

Insects are a class of living creatures within the arthropods that have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body , three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and two antennae...

s, spider

Spider

Spiders are air-breathing arthropods that have eight legs, and chelicerae with fangs that inject venom. They are the largest order of arachnids and rank seventh in total species diversity among all other groups of organisms...

s and small fruit

Fruit

In broad terms, a fruit is a structure of a plant that contains its seeds.The term has different meanings dependent on context. In non-technical usage, such as food preparation, fruit normally means the fleshy seed-associated structures of certain plants that are sweet and edible in the raw state,...

s.

The Sooty-capped Bush-Tanager’s call is a high tseet tseet, and the song is a scratchy seechur seechur see see seechur seechur with variations.