New Discovery: Gorgeted Puffleg

Breaking News From Reuters:

A new blue-and-green-throated hummingbird species has been discovered in a cloud forest in Colombia, and already needs protection from human encroachment, the experts who found the bird said on Sunday.

Called the gorgeted puffleg, the new species is easily twice as big as the thumb-sized hummingbirds found in the eastern United States, measuring between 3.5 inches and 4 inches (90 and 100 mm) in length, its discoverers said in answer to e-mailed questions.

The name comes from the iridescent emerald green and electric blue patch on the throat — the gorge — on males, and from tufts of white feathers at the top of the legs, a characteristic of so-called puffleg hummers.

Ornithologists Alexander Cortés-Diago and Luis Alfonso Ortega made three sightings of the hummingbird in 2005 during surveys of mountain cloud forest in the Serrania del Pinche in southwest Colombia. After the birds were seen again in 2006, photographs were sent to the Zoological Research Museum A. Koenig in Germany for confirmation.

“We immediately suspected the bird as a new species,” André Weller of the Brehm Fund for International Bird Conservation/Zoological Research Museum A. Koenig said in a statement. “Further study has shown that this is certainly the most spectacular discovery of a new hummingbird taxon during the last decade or more.”

The bird’s discoverers said they went to the Serrania del Pinche on a hunch: they expected to find new amphibians and possibly new ranges for known birds, but the new hummingbird was “completely unexpected,” Cortés-Diago said in a statement.

The isolated nature of the Serrania del Pinche means it may harbor more species, but it is threatened by slash-and-burn agriculture and the cultivation of coca, the plant used to make the drug cocaine.

“Destruction of habitat is the main threat caused by the migration of coca fields from the Caqueta and Putumayo areas to the Pacific,” said Luis Mazariegos-Hurtado of the Hummingbird Conservancy in Colombia. He added in an e-mail that slash-and-burn agriculture is expanding in the area, and this farming technique can cause “dangerous fires that can easily burn a whole mountain.”

Mazariegos said the creation of a new protected area — a national park or sanctuary — was needed to protect the gorgeted puffleg’s habitat.

More than the fate of this flamboyantly plumed hummingbird is at stake, according to Ian Davidson of the conservation group Birdlife International. Davidson said in a statement that the gorgeted puffleg is a “flagship species” for biodiversity in this cloud forest.

“To go undiscovered for so long, the bird’s range must be extremely small and fragile — hence conservation action is undoubtedly a priority for the Serrania del Pinche,” Davidson said. “Blue-throated hummingbird discovered in Colombia”, by Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters Environment Correspondent, May 13, 2007

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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