Yellow-winged Vireo

The yellow-winged vireo is 11 to 11.5 cm (4.3 to 4.5 in) long and weighs about 13 to 15 g (0.46 to 0.53 oz). The sexes have the same plumage. Adults have a gray-green crown. A whitish to buffy yellow area above the lores and eye-ring give the appearance of spectacles. Their nape and upperparts are dull greenish. Their wing coverts are dark greenish gray with wide whitish to pale yellow tips that show as two wing bars. Their primaries and secondaries are blackish gray with wide yellow-green edges. Their rectrices are blackish gray with wide greenish yellow edges on the outer webs. Their throat is yellowish white, their breast and belly yellow with yellowish green sides, and their vent yellow. They have a brown iris, a blackish maxilla, a pale gray mandible, and gray or bluish gray legs and feet. Juveniles have a more brownish back and more ochraceous wing bars than adults, with a buffy white supercilium and a buff tinge on the breast. It is the only vireo found in Costa Rica that has both yellow wing bars and yellow underparts.

The yellow-winged vireo is found in the Cordillera Central and Dota Mountains of Costa Rica and the Cordillera de Talamanca that stretches from central Costa Rica south into western Panama's Chiriquí Province. It inhabits humid evergreen forest in the upper subtropical and temperate zones. In elevation in Costa Rica it ranges from about 1,900 m (6,200 ft) up to treeline at about 3,000 m (9,800 ft). In Panama it ranges from about 1,300 m (4,300 ft) up to treeline.

The yellow-winged vireo feeds on insects, spiders, and berries. It forages at all levels in the interior and edges of the forest and often joins mixed-species feeding flocks.