Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Canopy Camp Hummers

While Canopy Camp had a lot fewer hummingbird feeders than some of the mid- and high-elevation places I've stayed in the tropics, it had a few more than many low-elevation locations that have none!  It can't be easy keeping the feeders from molding immediately in that kind of heat and humidity.  I'm not sure that I really kept track of the total number of hummers we saw visiting the feeder, but there were definitely some interesting ones.

Black-throated Mangos were quite common.  I can't think of any North American birds that have a dark stripe down the ventral midline the way female and young mangos do.

This is Blue-chested Hummingbird.
 In the past I'd only seen this bird perched high up in Costa Rican trees and had never seen one down low.

The somewhat similar Sapphire-throated Hummingbird doesn't occur any farther north than Eastern Panama.  The notched tail isn't visible in this pic.
I don't think I've ever seen a hummingbird with a bill that thick.  I never thought a hummingbird would remind me of a Willet, but if that's possible then this is the bird to do it.  We only saw a couple and only right in camp.

Blue-throated Goldentail is another bird I'd only seen in Costa Rican treetops.
 You wouldn't know it from the first pic, but this is another bird that you can blow off as a Rufous-tailed with just a glance.
You can see why with it perched given the bright pink bill and rufous rump.  The bill is shorter on the goldentail though, and obviously there's the blue throat.  The perched pic is a digi-scoped one Rhoda took, full-frame digi-scoping can still give superior results to cropped in SLR pics.  There'll be more digi-scoped pics in future posts.

Finally only the 2nd time that I've seen Long-billed Starthroat
It wasn't common enough to get any full-frame pics, but was fun to see nonetheless.

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