This Lesson’s Motmot (Momotus lessonii) perched on a moss-covered branch at Hacienda Montecristo, a coffee farm that offers birdwatching about 15 kilometers from Santa Rosa de Copán, Honduras, with its blue crown, black mask and racket-tipped tail in view. It lives in forest and woodland from southern Mexico to western Panama. Motmots like this one often sit very still, which makes them hard to see in dense forest despite their size. It eats insects and lizards and regularly takes fruit, and it nests in a tunnel dug into a bank.
I used a Canon R5 with the RF 800mm f/11 plus the RF 1.4x extender for this one, at 1/750 sec, f/16, ISO 6400, −0.5 EV. Hacienda Montecristo combines coffee growing with ecotourism and birdwatching, which gives the farm a reason to keep the trees these birds use.
©2024 Adam Rainoff Photographer
The bird
The Lesson’s Motmot (Momotus lessonii) belongs to the family Momotidae (Motmots) in the eBird/Clements taxonomy.
Conservation
Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (assessment published 2020), with the population trend listed as decreasing. Source: IUCN Red List