The bay-headed tanager (Tangara gyrola) is a medium-sized passerine bird. This tanager is a resident breeder in Costa Rica, Panama, South America south to Ecuador, Bolivia, and north-western Brazil, and on Trinidad.
Taxonomy
The bay-headed tanager was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae under the binomial name Fringilla gyrola. The specific epithet is a diminutive of the Latin gyrus meaning "ring". Linnaeus based his own description on the "red-headed green-finch" that had been described and illustrated by the English naturalist George Edwards in 1743 in his A Natural History of Uncommon Birds. The type locality is Suriname. The bay-headed tanager is now placed in the genus Tangara that was introduced by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760.
Nine subspecies are recognised: