Trogon rufus
Silhouette: Edwin Price · PhyloPic
In 3 days ~20% in a week ~30%
The Amazonian black-throated trogon (Trogon rufus) is a bird in the family Trogonidae, the trogons and quetzals. Although it has also been called "yellow-bellied trogon" it is not the only trogon with a yellow belly (such a description would apply to the Black-headed trogon, or the Citreoline trogon as well). It is found in every mainland South American country except Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
The Amazonian black-throated trogon was formally described in 1788 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with the other trogons in the genus Trogon and coined the binomial name Trogon rufus. Gmelin based his description on the "Couroucou à queue rousse de Cayenne" that had been described and illustrated in 1779 by the French polymath Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. Buffon's specimen was a female with brown upperparts that had been collected in Cayenne. It later gained the English name "black-throated trogon". The specific epithet rufus is Latin for "red" or "ruddy".
The black-throated trogon was long treated as having six subspecies... Wikipedia →
With luck
About 10% of wildlife watchers report a Black-throated Trogon sighting in Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve on a given day, based on 7 verified sightings from GBIF citizen-science data from 2019 to 2026. It is the 130th most-seen of the 412 birds we can rate there. Over three days the chance rises to about 20%, and over a week to about 30%, if each day is a fresh chance.
April and December–February
In those months about 10% of wildlife watchers report a Black-throated Trogon in Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve on a given day, against under 5% in March and May–November, the lowest months. Those are among Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve's driest months, with about 90 mm of rain a month against 510 mm in October.
Between 8 and 11 am
Across all the parks we cover, that three-hour window holds the most Black-throated Trogon sightings with a recorded time, and about 9 in 10 of them come between 6 am and 6 pm: it is a daytime animal.
18th of 34
Of the 34 parks where we can rate Black-throated Trogon sightings, Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve ranks 18th at about 10%. The best odds are in Corcovado National Park (Costa Rica, about 40%), Soberanía National Park (Panama, about 30%) and Brownsberg Nature Park (Suriname, about 20%). All parks ranked.
GBIF citizen-science records
It is estimated from how often the Black-throated Trogon is recorded against all the birds logged in Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve (7 verified sightings from 2019 to 2026), calibrated against known sighting rates. Figures are rounded to the nearest 10% because citizen-science data supports honest approximations, not decimals, and months with records from fewer than five people show "—". How it works.
