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Cinnamon Hummingbird | Amazilia rutila
Kaneelkleurige amazilia | Colibrí canelo
The Cinnamon Hummingbird is the hummingbird of the dry lowlands on the Pacific side of Mexico and Central America and of the Yucatán Peninsula. It stands out by its entirely cinnamon underparts and red bill. In dry forest, scrub and gardens it is often the commonest large hummingbird.
Voice
A hard, dry chik, often repeated, and in chases a sharp, rattling twitter.
Recording: Richard E. Webster — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · shortened to the first 60 s, mono · xeno-canto
Identification
10–11 cm, with a straight red bill with a black tip. The upperparts are bronze-green. The whole underside, from throat to undertail coverts, is plain cinnamon. The tail is rufous with bronze-green edges and tips. The sexes are similar.
Confusion species
Rufous-tailed Hummingbird Amazilia tzacatl and Buff-bellied Hummingbird Amazilia yucatanensis have a glittering green throat and breast. Rufous Sabrewing Pampa rufa also has cinnamon underparts, but is larger, has a slightly decurved black bill and lives in montane forest. Females of Selasphorus species, such as Rufous Hummingbird Selasphorus rufus, are smaller, with a black bill and a white throat with dark spots.
Habitat
Dry and semi-deciduous forest, thorn scrub, forest edges, mangrove edges, plantations and gardens, from sea level to about 1000 m, locally higher. It fiercely defends flowering trees and shrubs against other hummingbirds.
Where the bird is most at home, classified by the vegetation units of Mexico and Central America.
Range and movements
Almost endemic to the guide area. On the Pacific slope of Mexico from southern Sinaloa through Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima, Michoacán, Guerrero and Oaxaca to Chiapas; also on the Yucatán Peninsula and in Belize; further on the Pacific slope of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua to north-west Costa Rica, in Honduras also in dry interior valleys.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In gardens and dry forest along the Pacific coast of Mexico, for example around San Blas, Puerto Vallarta and Huatulco, and at the ruins of Yucatán; in Costa Rica in Guanacaste, including Palo Verde National Park. Often at flowering trees along roads and around farmyards.
Conservation status
Least Concern. Common in a large range; the species adapts well to man-made landscapes.
Scientific name
Amazilia rutila | (Delattre, 1843)
Delattre described the species in 1843 as Ornismya rutila; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Amazilia was introduced in 1843 by Lesson. Amazilia comes from Amazili, an Inca heroine in Jean-François Marmontel's novel Les Incas (1777). rutila is Latin, from rutilus 'golden-red, auburn', after the cinnamon plumage. The specimen the first description was based on came from Mexico (not specified).