Also known as: Doctor Bird, Long-tail Doctor Bird, God Bird, Scissors-tail Hummingbird.
Jamaica’s doctor bird
The Red-billed Streamertail (Trochilus polytmus) is endemic to Jamaica, forming its own genus on the island. Often described as the most spectacular hummingbird of the insular Caribbean, it is also the easiest Jamaican endemic to observe — and the country’s national bird.
Most Jamaicans know it as the “doctor bird.” It is deeply woven into Jamaican folklore, and in much of rural Jamaica killing one is held to bring misfortune.
Identification
The adult male is unmistakable: a glossy emerald-green body, a black velvety crest, a bright coral-red bill tipped with black, and two greatly elongated black tail streamers that can roughly double the bird’s length and produce a humming flutter in flight. Females lack the streamers and the red is reduced, with white underparts.
Range and habitat
The bird is an abundant, widespread resident found across Jamaica from sea level to the highest mountains, wherever flowering plants occur. It is most numerous in closed forest but is also a common garden bird and a familiar visitor to nectar feeders. It is absent only from the extreme eastern tip of the island.
There it meets its close relative, the Black-billed Streamertail, which occupies eastern Jamaica. The two were once treated as one species; they differ in bill colour and width, courtship and call, and form a narrow hybrid zone between the Blue Mountains and the John Crow Mountains.
Diet and status
Like other hummingbirds it feeds on nectar, supplemented by small insects and spiders taken on the wing or gleaned from foliage. The Red-billed Streamertail is common and is assessed as Least Concern, making it one of the Caribbean’s conservation success stories — a widespread endemic thriving alongside people.
