Critically Endangered
Blue-throated Hillstar
Oreotrochilus cyanolaemus
The blue-throated hillstar is a hummingbird found only in a small portion of the southwestern Andes in Ecuador.
Appearance
The top of the head of the male blue-throated hillstar is iridescent emerald green, that extends from the forehead to the base of the crown. The iridescent highlights are blue-green. The nape of the neck, mantle, lower portion of the back, rump, and upperwing coverts are bright emerald green.
Range and habitat
The preferred the blue-throated hillstar usually lives in grassland with patches of shrubs in the Andean paramo. The terrain in that it was found included hilly regions, steep terrain, rocky outcrops, and stream banks. Collected males were also found to have eaten flies.
The area will also preserve portions of the Inca trail, an ancient trail used by the Inca empire to connect Cuzco with its northern capital, Quito.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
In crisis
No more than 750 individuals have been estimated to exist, and this population is highly threatened by fire, grazing, and gold mining.
Blue-throated Hillstar is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Blue-throated Hillstar, Wikidata item Q56807945. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
