Green Hermit Hummingbird female, Asa Wright Nature Centre, Trinidad

This morning, I'm posting just a couple of photos - this one from Trinidad, taken on 20 March 2017 on Trinidad, and the Western Meadowlark was seen yesterday, 1 May, when two friends and I were out on the back roads, visiting a Sharp-tailed Grouse lek. This lek is on private land at an undisclosed location. I stayed up all night the night before, as I would have had to get up at the same time I usually go to bed. This is such a special occasion and I didn't dare risk sleeping through my alarm clocks, and missing the day. For some reason, the Grouse kept their distance, apart from a couple that did come a bit closer just very briefly. We were so lucky with the weather.

I think this was the only time I saw one of these Green Hermit Hummingbirds, so I'm glad I was able to get a couple of quick shots of it before it flew off. The little bird in the background is a male Purple Honeycreeper.

"The green hermit (Phaethornis guy) is a large hummingbird that is a resident breeder from southern Central America (Costa Rica and Panama) south to northern South America (north-eastern Venezuela and Trinidad, and the northern Andes of eastern Peru).

It is 13.5 cm (5.3 in) long and weighs 6.3 g (0.22 oz). The male is mainly dark green with a blue-green rump. It has a dark mask through the eye, with buff stripes above and below this, and down the centre of the throat. The central feathers of the tapered tail are—for large hermit—relatively short and white-tipped, and are wiggled in display at the communal leks. The reddish bill is long and decurved. The female is sooty gray (rather than green) below, with an even longer bill and a much longer tail.

This hermit inhabits forest undergrowth, usually near water, and prefers hilly areas. It seems to favor primary rainforest and wet premontane forest, and though it tolerates some amount of habitat destruction (e.g. subsistence farmland) it will try to avoid secondary forest as long as better habitat is available." From Wikipedia.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_hermit