Rufous-tailed Hummingbird, Rio Santiago Lodge, Honduras

In honor of several inches of fresh snow on the ground here in Maine this morning, we will return to hot Honduran hummingbirds. This is the Rufous-tailed Hummingbird, photographed at the Rio Santiago Lodge, high up on the shoulders of Pico Bonito in Honduras. The Lodge is 5 km up a single track road, at the very end. Strangely enough, there are not one, but two churches, just below the lodge. I am not sure what population they serve up there on the mountain, apparently far from any dwellings. The lodge is famous for hummingbirds. They maintain over 50 feeders, hung from the outdoor patios and the trees on the grounds. We saw 12 species while we were there, and there is potential for a half a dozen more.

The colors on a hummingbird, especially the gorget on head and throat, are not pigment…they are the result of light refracted through tiny bubbles in the feathers, so the colors vary greatly depending on the angle of the light and its intensity. I think this is the same bird in each frame. It returned to the same perch but the images were taken over the course of a couple of hours, and the light was changing all the time.

Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. 1/125th second at ISO 1000-1250. Processed and cropped for scale in Lightroom and assembled in Phototastic on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.