More small hummingbirds

Bumblebee Hummingbird

Very similar to the Wine-throated Hummingbird of the previous entry is Bumblebee Hummingbird, which replaces it north of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. I myself went north of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec last week, on a business trip quite similar to the one I undertook in March of this year. This time I visited the Veracruz River of Raptors project, a project I worked for in 2008, 2009 and 2011. I got one day of birding in the pine-oak forests of La Joya in, just west of Xalapa. Bumblebee Hummingbird is locally common there.

Unlike the male Wine-throated Hummingbird, which perches conspicuously and vocalizes constantly, flashing his brilliant gorget in all directions, the male Bumblebee Hummingbird is more low-key, and apparently perches inside the vegetation, where it was difficult to find. Every once in a while, a conspecific would fly by and mouse-like squeaks emanated from the vegetation, while the producer of those squeaks remained invisible. They were more easily seen when feeding, moving slowly but constantly like a bumblebee from flower to flower.

Sparkling-tailed Hummingbird

A similar feeding style is seen in Sparkling-tailed Hummingbird. This morning I photographed this female as it fed quietly in a flowerbed on the top of Cerro de Hula (Honduras).

Wine-throated Hummingbird

Many migratory birds that breed in the United States and Canada have finished breeding and have started to show up in Honduras recently. Many residents have also finished their breeding season, and juveniles of those species which retain a juvenal plumage for a while (like Rusty Sparrow, Eastern Bluebird and Bushy-crested Jay, to name a few) now seem to be everywhere.

For one group of residents – the nectarivores – the breeding season is just starting here in Honduras. Both hummingbirds and flowerpiercers are easily found these days, because many of them are quite vocal and active. Some species, like the Wine-throated Hummingbird pictured above, spend much of their time displaying at leks, and produce an endless series of chips when perched on a favorite branch, or a surprisingly musical song when hovering in front of a female. 

While chirping from an exposed perch, the male often puffs up his extravagant gorget, which glitters bright magenta from some angles, but shows a duller green or a dark wine-red from other angles.  

Posturing also forms part of the display of this species. Every once in a while, whenever a conspecific flew past (my feeling was males mostly, but I'm not 100% sure), the displaying perched male would spread his tail and raise his wings, but remain perched, apparently to impress another male, or perhaps to impress the watching female.

We observed these Wine-throated Hummingbirds in La Tigra National Park, near Tegucigalpa, last Saturday. While hummingbirds and flowerpiercers can be hard to find at times, their songs are now frequently heard, and watching their displays is fascinating. We also observed several male Green-breasted Mountain-gems dueling fiercely in mid-air.

Cerulean Warbler

Fall migration is truly underway here in Honduras also, not only with a good variety of shorebirds present (Roselvy and I had good shorebirds last Monday), but with the first warblers also showing up now.

This afternoon, on a brief outing on the slope of Cerro de Hula, right behind our house, we found a first fall male Cerulean Warbler feeding in a free-standing oak surrounded by farm land. Cerro de Hula has some notable residents, including Ocellated Quail and a sizable population of Sedge Wren, but things really get interesting in migration. Last year in spring migration I had a Cerulean on the same dirt road going up to the top of Cerro de Hula; that was my first in Honduras. Today, number two.

Cerulean Warbler is an early migrant, with the first individuals reaching the South American wintering ground in August. The eBird map shows birds just starting to arrive on the Gulf coast; our record is the first in Central America this fall.

Fonseca Rails

I've written here a couple of times before about the Clapper Rails of the Gulf of Fonseca. I've even written a short note documenting breeding in Honduras for El Esmeralda, the bulletin of the Asociación Hondureña de Ornitología (ASHO).

Clapper Rail was first found and documented in the Honduran part of the Gulf of Fonseca in 2010, by Robert Gallardo and Mayron Mejía. In 2012, the species was first reported from the Nicaraguan side of the Gulf by Jens Olek Byskov, Salvadora Morales, Orlando Jarquín and Juan Carlos Alaniz, and in 2013, Oliver Komar, Roselvy Juárez and I found it on the Salvadoran part of the Gulf.

I corresponded about these birds with James Maley, a rail researcher from the University of Wyoming, who expressed an interest in sampling specimens from this population. Together, we wrote a research proposal which we submitted to ICF, the Honduran governmental organization in charge of research permits. James is here right now and we have just finished a week of field work, in which we collected a total of 8 specimens. This series will be used for a taxonomic description of this population.

This week, with the help of playback, we got a sense of how common this species really is in the Gulf of Fonseca. For example, one transect that was about 450 m long had an estimated 15 pairs and 3 single individuals – that's 33 individuals, on a relatively small stretch of mangrove. In some parts, densities seemed so high that we wondered if Clapper Rail was perhaps the second most common species there, after (Mangrove) Yellow Warbler! While few birders or biologists have seen this species in Honduras, most locals that we talked to in the salt ponds and shrimp farms of the area knew the bird well. One of them assisted us with field work, and he told us those birds have been common there for as long as he could remember – at least 40 years!

Remarkable then that this population, apparently never rare, went undiscovered for so long. Given available habitat and abundant food resources, there are probably thousands if not tens of thousands of these rails in the Gulf of Fonseca.

Two tropical birds: one expected, one not

Last Saturday, Roselvy and I set out to find Long-tailed Manakin and Blue-tailed Hummingbird in Choluteca, two species that we hadn't observed yet this year in Honduras. While we easily found those species in a community called La Fortuna, situated in humid middle elevation forest among coffee and mango plantations more or less in the middle of the department of Choluteca, I did not get any (reasonable) photos.

I did get photos of Tropical Pewee (top) and Tropical Gnatcatcher. While the former was expected and indeed quite common there, the latter wasn't really on our radar screen for that part of the country. 

When we heard a descending trill, we didn't immediately recognize it. Locating the singer was not difficult, and upon seeing a gnatcatcher producing that song, I instantly realized it had to be Tropical Gnatcatcher. It occurs in eastern and northern Honduras, and is no doubt common in many areas, but these are exactly the areas far from where we live, where we haven't done that much birding yet.

For us, this was a cool and unexpected find, well outside its known range.