The Story
This is a Buff-tailed Coronet (Boissonneaua flavescens) that I photographed at the Río Blanco reserve near Manizales, Caldas, Colombia on June 24, 2017. It lives in humid montane forest and cloud forest between about 2,000 and 3,500 meters. It is highly territorial, though it may share a flowering tree with other hummingbirds. It is a hummingbird of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela, with a buff tail and cinnamon underwings that show in flight. The Río Blanco reserve covers 4,932 hectares of cloud forest on the Central Andes, about 3 kilometers northeast of Manizales.
I photographed it with a Canon EOS 70D and the EF400mm f/5.6L USM, at 1/1000 sec, f/6.3, ISO 1600. IUCN lists the Buff-tailed Coronet as Least Concern with a decreasing population, and BirdLife International lists Río Blanco as an Important Bird Area, protected because its forest supplies about a third of the drinking water of Manizales.
©2018 Adam Rainoff Photographer
The bird
The Buff-tailed Coronet (Boissonneaua flavescens) belongs to the family Trochilidae (Hummingbirds) in the eBird/Clements taxonomy.
Source: eBird.org (opens in a new tab)
Conservation
Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (assessment published 2025), with the population trend listed as decreasing. Source: IUCN Red List