A few are recorded from far southeastern Peru, but its status there is unclear, in part due to the potential of confusion with the very similar juveniles of the blue-grey tanager.

It occurs in a wide range of open to semiopen habitats, but generally avoids the interior of dense forest (such as the Amazon).

This tanager visits farmland in search of orchards and adapts readily to urban environment, as long as some arboreal cover and a supply of fruits are available.

It feeds on flowers, buds, and insects,[2] and this omnivorous lifestyle has helped it to become perhaps the most — or one of the most — common urban birds in southeastern Brazil, along with the rufous-bellied thrush.

[3] In 1648, well before the introduction of the binomial system, the German naturalist Georg Marcgrave had described the sayaca tanager as the Sayacu in his Historia Naturalis Brasiliae.