Author: Jennifer Leman / Source: Science News
A new hummingbird species has been discovered high in the Ecuadorian Andes, but in numbers so low the bird may already be critically endangered.
Named for its cobalt-colored feathers, the blue-throated hillstar hummingbird nibbles on insects and slurps pollen from chuquiraga plants in a remote, treeless ecosystem known as the Páramo. Like other high-altitude hummingbirds from the same genus, the newly identified Oreotrochilus cyanolaemus has a host of adaptations to live above 3,500 meters, where the air is thinner, colder and oxygen-poor, researchers report September 26 in The Auk: Ornithological Advances.
“We weren’t expecting a new [species] from this area,” says evolutionary biologist Elisa Bonaccorso of the Universidad San Francisco de…
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