A walk in the woods: Hummingbirds

One of the things I really wanted to see was a hummingbird. "The book" says there are lots of different hummingbirds in Belize. The road south to Dangriga is called the Hummingbird Highway. But a month in, I still hadn't seen one. Ruth saw one in a garden in Belize City - but I wasn't there.

Then we took a walk in the woods nearby. That's where we saw what I was sure, at first, were large dragonflies. No bigger than my thumb, and hovering and darting in just the way that dragonflies do. It was only when they landed on a branch for a moment that I realised what they were.


I found them immensely difficult to photograph. They are so small, and move so quickly. My first attempt at photographing them just resulted in lots of blurry pictures that could have been anything. So we went back to the same spot another day, and tried again. This is the result. Still not brilliant, but the best we've managed so far.


But what sort of hummingbird are they? The truth is, I don't know what the first one is. It looks very distinctive: small bird - about 3" or 4" - with straight white bill, emerald back and copper coloured tail feathers. The most likely candidate is the "Rufous tailed hummingbird" - it is the right colours (green and red) and is apparently the commonest hummingbird in Belize. But it has a red bill with a black tip, which doesn't seem to match what we saw.

The photographs of the second bird are not as good. (I must learn to control the manual focus better on the camera - in these shots the focus is set on the foliage, not the bird.) But even so, I'm slightly more confident about this identification: the "white bellied emerald". About the same size - only 3 - 4" and again, fairly common throughout Belize.