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Blue-tailed Hummingbird | Saucerottia cyanura
Blauwstaartamazilia | Colibrí cola azul
The Blue-tailed Hummingbird is a small green hummingbird of the Pacific slopes of southern Chiapas, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. It closely resembles Berylline Hummingbird but has a blue-black tail. The two are sometimes treated as one species, because intermediates occur in southern Chiapas and Guatemala.
Voice
A dry, buzzy dzit and a dry, twittering rattle in chases. The song is a series of high, scratchy notes.
Recording: Mike Nelson — CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
9–10 cm, with a straight black bill with a pink to red base to the lower mandible. The head, throat and breast are glittering green. The wings usually have a rufous patch at the base of the secondaries, varying in extent between populations. The rump is purplish-bronze, the uppertail coverts blue-violet and the tail blue-black. The lower belly is greyish. The female is duller.
Confusion species
Berylline Hummingbird Saucerottia beryllina has a purplish-chestnut tail and uppertail coverts and occurs mainly higher in the mountains. Blue-vented Hummingbird Saucerottia hoffmanni has no rufous in the wings and steel-blue undertail coverts; both occur in western Nicaragua. Rufous-tailed Hummingbird Amazilia tzacatl is larger and has a red bill and a rufous tail.
Habitat
Forest edges, secondary forest, semi-deciduous forest, scrub, shade coffee and gardens, mainly on the Pacific slopes between about 300 and 1800 m, locally lower. It feeds at flowering shrubs and trees, often in coffee plantations.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
Endemic to the guide area. On the Pacific slopes of southern Chiapas and Guatemala, further in El Salvador, southern and central Honduras and western Nicaragua and its central highlands. In Costa Rica only a few records in the north.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In the coffee plantations and forest edges on the southern slopes of the volcanoes around Lake Atitlán in Guatemala, for example in the Los Tarrales reserve in Suchitepéquez, and in the coffee region around Matagalpa and Jinotega in Nicaragua.
Conservation status
Not threatened. Locally fairly common. The species also uses shade coffee and forest edges; conversion of forest to open farmland affects the species locally.
Scientific name
Saucerottia cyanura | (Gould, 1859)
Gould described the species in 1859 as Amazilia cyanura; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Saucerottia was introduced in 1850 by Bonaparte. Saucerottia honours the French physician and ornithologist Antoine Constant Saucerotte; the name derives from the epithet saucerottei (1846). cyanura is Greek, from kuanos 'dark blue' and oura 'tail', after the blue tail. The specimen the first description was based on came from Realejo, Nicaragua.