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This Morning Outsideby Diane PorterApril 18, 2010 Some streamertail hummingbirds have tails three times as long as their bodies. When they fly around you (and they do), their black tails follow like ribbons in the air, showing where they've been. This male, with a shorter tail than some, was moving too fast for the camera to freeze the motion. But if you look carefully you'll see that the fine tips of his tail reach the bottom of the photo, in the lower red blossom.
I watched this bird feeding among the flowers right next to the veranda at Forres Park Lodge, high in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. Forres Park caters to bird watchers and arranges birding trips for guests to even higher elevation locations, where rare Jamaican birds live among the mists. Recently, scientists have decreed that the Red-billed Streamertail and the Black-billed Streamertail really are two forms of one species. That puts the total for Jamaican hummingbird species at three instead of four. However, some experts familiar with Jamaican birds believe that lumping the two was a mistake, and that in the future the Black-billed and Red-billed Streamertails will once again be regarded as separate species. Jamaica Birds Book |
