Yellow-Legged Thrush

The Yellow-Legged Thrush (Turdus flavipes) is a songbird of northern and eastern South America and the Caribbean. It forages in shrubs and trees; it only seldom forages on the ground. It typically consumes fruits and berries, such as those from the Melastomataceae family. It hardly ever joins mixed-species feeding flocks since it prefers to stay on the treetops and finds it rarely advantageous to do so. On a bank or in between rocks, the nest is a lined shallow cup made of twigs. Reddish-blotched green or blue eggs with two or three are laid.

This thrush weighs 55–70 g and measures 22–23 cm in length. The eye-ring and legs of both sexes are yellow. The male has a yellow bill and is typically black in color with grey underparts and a slate-grey back. A male of one of the five subspecies, P. f. xanthoscelus of Tobago, is all-black, resembling the male Eurasian blackbird, but the color of the grey patches varies (Turdus merula). The bill of the female is dull, and she has paler underparts and warm brown upperparts. While the juvenile female resembles the adult female but is duller, flecked with orange above, and spotted and barred with dark brown below, the juvenile male is brownish with black wings and a tail.