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Slender Sheartail | Doricha enicura
Kleine schaarstaartkolibrie | Colibrí tijereta
The Slender Sheartail is a small hummingbird of the highlands of Chiapas and northern Central America. The male has a very long, deeply forked black tail, longer than the rest of the body and usually held closed in a narrow point. It is inconspicuous and often feeds low in semi-open country.
Voice
A dry, high tsik or tsit, sometimes rapidly repeated.
Recording: Edgardo Orozco Díaz — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · converted to mono · xeno-canto
Identification
8–9 cm without the male's elongated tail feathers, with a fairly long, slightly decurved black bill. The male is green above, with a glittering magenta-purple throat, a whitish breast, green flanks and a very long, deeply forked black tail. The female has a dark eyestripe with a pale supercilium, cinnamon to buff underparts and a rounded tail with a rufous base, a black band and white tips.
Confusion species
Male Sparkling-tailed Woodstar Tilmatura dupontii has a short, straight bill, a blue to violet throat, a black-and-white banded tail and white patches on the rump. Wine-throated Hummingbird Selasphorus ellioti is smaller, has a straight bill and rufous in the tail; the male has a wine-red throat and a short tail. Female Ruby-throated Hummingbird Archilochus colubris has a straight bill and white underparts.
Habitat
Semi-open country in the mountains with scrub, hedgerows and flowering shrubs, edges of pine-oak forest and cloud forest, clearings, coffee plantations and gardens, at about 900 to 2500 m. It usually feeds low at small flowers of shrubs and herbs.
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. In the highlands of Chiapas in southern Mexico and in the highlands of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
- Resident
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
In Chiapas around San Cristóbal de las Casas and in the surrounding mountains; in Guatemala in the highlands, such as around Antigua and Lake Atitlán, at flowering shrubs along forest edges and in gardens.
Conservation status
Least Concern. Fairly scarce and local, but it also occurs in semi-open farmland. Loss of highland forest and scrub affects it locally.
Scientific name
Doricha enicura | (Vieillot, 1818)
Vieillot described the species in 1818 as Trochilus enicurus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Doricha was introduced in 1854 by Reichenbach. Doricha is named after Doricha (fl. 700 BC), a famous Greek courtesan or hetaira. enicura probably comes from Greek henikos 'single, peculiar' and oura 'tail', after the long, deeply forked tail. The specimen the first description was based on came from Guatemala (originally given in error as Brazil).