Card #043 · Birds
Resplendent quetzal
Pharomachrus mocinno
Uncommon NT · Near Threatened
Field notes
- Classification
- Order Trogoniformes · Family Trogonidae
- Range
- Cloud forest, southern Mexico to Panama
- Size
- 36–40 cm (plumes to 1 m)
- Weight
- ~210 g (7.4 oz)
- Lifespan
- ~10 yrs (wild)
- Diet
- Wild avocados, insects
Most Notable
The streamers are not the tail. They are the feathers that merely cover it, and on a breeding male they reach a metre, about three times the length of the bird carrying them.
He nests in a hole rotted into a standing tree, and the hole is never big enough for what he is carrying. So he sits on the eggs with the streamers folded up and out over the rim, hanging down the trunk behind him, where they pass for a fern growing out of the wood.
It plants the forest it lives in. Quetzals swallow wild avocados whole and bring the stones back up some distance away, and they are credited with dispersing at least thirty-two tree species.
You will read that killing one carried the death penalty under Aztec and Maya law. That story is repeated everywhere and traces to nothing solid. What is solid is that the feathers were elite tribute goods, restricted to royalty, and the bird was tied to Quetzalcoatl and Kukulkan.
Guatemala named its money after it. The currency is the quetzal, and the bird is on the flag and the coat of arms.
It needs rotten wood to breed. The nest is dug into soft decaying timber, so a tidy forest with the dead trees taken out is a forest with nowhere for quetzals to nest, which is part of why cloud forest clearance hits it so hard.
Range: Cloud forest, southern Mexico to western Panama.