Hummingbird, presumed to be extinct, spotted in Colombia

#hummingbird #colombia #santamarta The hummingbird had long been given up as lost and believed to be extinct but, good news have surfaced that some of them still exist in Colombia highlands where a rare breed of this bird has been sighted.
This has been reported in foxnews.com dated 20 March 2015.
In 2014, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and BirdLife International had classified the species as "Critically Endangered" and possibly "Extinct" but, wonders will never cease and, earlier this month Carlos Julio Rojas and Christian Vásquez, spotted three of the blue-bearded helmetcrests in the wilds of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta National Park.
They are two conservationists and one of them managed to capture the photo of the blue-bearded helmetcrest on camera for the first time. This allowed scientists and bird lovers the world over to breathe a sigh of relief knowing that this avian wonder still exists.
Carlos Julio Rojas and Christian Vásquez, the scientist were delighted at their discovery and set up camp at the site and for the next two days conducted observations around the area. They managed to document a total of three individuals of the helmetcrest within three tiny scattered patches of habitat on steep hillsides and surrounded by the remains of burnt vegetation.
As to its description, the blue-bearded helmetcrest is less than 5 inches in length, has a prominent crest and elongated throat feathers that give the look of a beard. The species is known only from 62 museum specimens and the most recent of these were collected in 1946 by the American ornithologist Melbourne Armstrong Carriker.
The medium size hummingbird used to be seen in the Santa Marta region of northeast Colombia and had been first discovered in 1880 but had not been sighted in the highlands since 2011. It had been presumed that extensive burning and overgrazing had severely degraded its high-altitude habitat and killed off the remaining birds.

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