14 DAY TRIAL // Besides being the smallest birds in the world (a Jamaican species, Mellisuga minima, is 6 cm (2.3 inch) long and weighs 2g), hummingbirds have also other peculiar characteristics, like the hovering ability, being the only birds species in the world able to move their wings equally forth and back.
Now, to the about 400 species already known, a new one is added by science. The Gorgeted Puffleg, a rare hummingbird displaying a plumage of violet blue and iridescent green on its throat, has been found living in the cloud forests of southwestern Colombia.
The species belongs to the Puffleg genus (Eriocnemis), which have "little cotton balls above their legs," said Luis Mazariegos-Hurtado, who has dedicated 30 years of his life to studying hummingbirds and is the founder of the Colombian Hummingbird Conservancy.
The new species, baptized Eriocnemis isabellae, was confirmed by two of the world's leading specialists on the puffleg, Karl L. Schuchmann, curator of ornithology at Zoological Research Museum A. Koenig in Germany and F. Gary Stiles of the Instituto de Ciencias Naturales at Colombia's Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
The birds were first observed in the mountain ridge in the Cauca province in 2005. Roaming the area, the researchers braved the zone's leftist rebels and drug traffickers.
But although just discovered, the species faces extinction due to habitat loss by slashing and burning of trees by coca farmers.
Ornithologists ask the government to protect the bird's tiny territory, only on one mountain ridge, Serrania del Pinche, in southwest Colombia, from drugs industry, which destroys large tracts of forest to grow the illegal crops of coca, from which cocaine is extracted. A natural reserve of 494,000 acres would be enough to protect the species.
Coca and other crops engulf yearly 1,235 acres of forests near the Gorgeted Puffleg's territory.
And the remoteness of the area induced an increasing trend in coca cultivation from coca farmers arrived to escape the government's eradication program in other areas of Colombia.
"The Gorgeted Puffleg brings to 15 the number of species of the bird, mostly found in Colombia which is home to nearly half of the world's 300-plus species of hummingbirds." said Mazariegos-Hurtado.
Colombia is the most varied country in the world in bird diversity, with over 1,800 species.