Hummingbirds of Paraiso

After leaving Hotel Bougainvillea we headed a couple hours up in elevation and stopped for lunch at a restaurant called Paraiso del Quetzal (or something like that).  It was quite good, however, the reason to go there was the clouds of hummingbirds that descend upon their feeders.

Green Violet-ears were common to say nothing of photogenic.

The real attractions, however, were the hordes of Fiery-throated Hummingbirds that didn't come into feeders anywhere else to my memory.  A person could hold their finger up to the perch and they would land on the finger to drink.  The birds would whip past your ear so close you could feel the air from a hummingbird's wings.  I would guesstimate that I took about 800 shots of Fiery-throated alone, trying to catch that throat lit up.

Magnificent Hummingbird was the other common hummingbird.  It's a different subspecies from the one that sneaks into Arizona and will probably eventually be split into Rivoli's Hummingbird per Steven.

The female (above) has a longer bill than the male presumably to allow them to to feed on different flowers and not expend energy defending a patch from a mate.  Here's a young male:

The final hummer present here was Volcano Hummingbird, a small Selasphorus species that I'll talk more about in future posts.  I assume this is a female.