From March 25 - 31, 2017 I birded the central Pacific highlands and the Parque Regional Municipal Todos Santos Cuchamatán in Guatemala. Click on the links below to see some of the great birds I saw thanks to the skills and knowledge of Guatemala-based BIRDING EXPEDITIONS.
NOTE: I was birding first, photographing second (as usual) on this trip, thus the quality of the photos below varies greatly from "very good" to "pretty crappy". In most cases our views of a bird were much better than the photos obtained of it; part of the purpose of this gallery is to show just how many good birds can be seen - if you use a really good locally based birding tour company such as Birding Expeditions.
The taxonomy of the Berylline/Blue-tailed/Steely-vented Hummingbird complex has been recently studied (CLICK HERE to go to the 2016 paper by Rosa Alicia Jimenez, Juan Francisco Ornelas). The bottom line seems to be that all birds in Guatemala are genetically Blue-tailed, even though there is quite a lot of morphological variation, especially in that some birds are more like Berylline Hummingbird in appearance. At this time Clements and eBird do not recognize this assignation, and have a ssp. of Berylline Hummingbird (devillei) occurring in Guatemala. I plan to call such birds Blue-tailed for now.
These "standard" Blue-tailed Hummingbirds (Amazilia cyanura) were at Los Tarrales:
This "Berylline-like" Blue-tailed Hummingbird was also at Los Tarrales:
