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Turquoise-throated Puffleg | Eriocnemis godini
Turkoois pluimbroekje | Calzadito turquesa | Calçudo-de-garganta-turquesa
The Turquoise-throated Puffleg is known from a handful of 19th-century specimens collected in the dry valleys near Quito in northern Ecuador. The species has not been found with certainty since, and it may be extinct. Some researchers consider the possibility that it is an aberrant form or a hybrid.
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Voice
Unknown.
No recording with a suitable Creative Commons licence is available for this species yet.
Identification
10–11 cm, with a short, straight black bill and a forked, blue-black tail. The male is green, with a glittering turquoise-blue throat, glittering green underparts, violet-blue undertail coverts and white leg puffs. The female is duller, with less blue on the throat. Nothing is known about juveniles.
Confusion species
Glowing Puffleg Eriocnemis vestita has a smaller, more violet throat patch and a glittering golden-green rump, and lives higher, at the treeline. Sapphire-vented Puffleg Eriocnemis luciani is larger, with a longer tail and no blue throat. Black-breasted Puffleg Eriocnemis nigrivestis from the area around Quito has a blackish breast.
Habitat
The old specimens come from the dry, shrubby valleys around Quito, probably from riparian woodland and scrub along streams, roughly between 2100 and 2300 m. Food and nest have not been described; like its relatives, it presumably visited flowering shrubs.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of the Andes and the west coast.
Range and movements
In Ecuador known only from the northern Andes, in particular the Guayllabamba valley near Quito. An old, uncertain record refers to southern Colombia. Absent from Peru, Bolivia and the Galápagos. Does not occur outside the guide area.
How and when to look
Targeted searches in the remaining riparian thickets of the dry valleys north of Quito offer the only chance of a sighting. A possible sighting should be well documented with photographs.
Conservation status
Critically Endangered, possibly extinct. The original scrub and riparian woodland in the valleys around Quito has largely been converted to fields, pasture and buildings.
Scientific name
Eriocnemis godini | (Bourcier, 1851)
Bourcier described the species in 1851 as Trochilus Godini; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Eriocnemis was introduced in 1849 by Reichenbach. The genus name combines Greek erion, 'wool', with knēmis, 'legging', after the downy feather tufts on the legs. The species name honours Louis Godin (1704–1760), a French astronomer who worked on Hispaniola, in Ecuador and in Peru from 1735 to 1751. The specimen the first description was based on came from Guayllabamba Valley, Pichincha, Ecuador.