The white-booted racket-tail hummingbird is one of my favorite birds from our trip to Colombia. I wish I'd seen more of them and gotten more and better photos.
It is found in the Andes of Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. There are five subspecies and we saw the subspecies incommodus, found in the Central and Western Andes of Colombia.
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| White-booted racket-tail range from Wikipedia. |
Males have a metallic-green body and black wings, a greenish-gray throat, large puffy white leg feathers (the white boots) and a long green tail with the two outside tail feathers extended as bare shafts with rackets at the end (the racket-tail). It is the motmot of the hummingbird world. The boots and tail really set this bird apart. The rackets are one of the distinguishing features of the different subspecies. Incommodus has bluish black oval flags.
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| My photo shows a black throat, but it is just a matter of how the light is hitting it. |
Females have a white throat with green speckles, have smaller white leg feathers and have a white-tipped tail that is not as long and is without the rackets at the end. The white throat and the pattern of green spots on it are one of the distinguishing features of the subspecies. Incommodus is medium to scarcely spotted.
I remember seeing this hummingbird, but I totally missed the cool boots.
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