Listening and looking for a ghostly messenger

It's an understatement to say the bird has been elusive to science. Until 2022, there had only been one other documented sighting this century, a single bird photographed in 2010. Before that the only specimens known to science were collected in 1872 and 1946, by English explorer Friederick A. A. Simmons and American ornithologist Melbourne Armstrong Carriker from near the Guatapurí River in the Cesar region of Colombia. The Santa Marta Sabrewing was one of the top 10 most wanted lost birds by the Search for Lost Birds, a collaboration between Re:wild, American Bird Conservancy and BirdLife International. It was the first species on the list to be rediscovered.

The ghostly bird was rediscovered in June 2022 by Yurgen Vega, a local birder working with SELVA, ProCAT Colombia and World Parrot Trust, who spotted it by chance while searching for another endemic bird species. Seven months later, a separate group of researchers, Carlos Esteban Lara and Andrés M. Cuervo with Universidad Nacioanle de Colombia, also found four of the birds in the same location.

American Bird Conservancy and the Search for Lost Birds provided a grant to help Vega, SELVA, Universidad Nacional de Colombia learn more about the sabrewing over the past year in partnership with communities in Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Returning with a team to the same spot every month since, Vega has seen the bird each time.

“I’ve been lucky enough to go to the field every month and spend four or five days searching for males and females,” says Vega. “I’ve learned a lot: seeing the males lekking and displaying, and the males and females searching for food.”

Botero-Delgadillo is also part of SELVA’s team and says the Santa Marta Sabrewing’s behaviour is similar to the lekking behaviours — a lek is a small area where male birds gather for courtship and mating — of other sabrewings. What sets the species apart, he says, is its ability to survive in habitats with a mix of agroforestry, like coffee and banana plantations, riparian forests and second-growth forest.

“Jurgen took the first-ever pictures of the female and he saw them consuming nectar from banana flowers and gathering material for a nest,” says Botero-Delgadillo. “In terms of migration, it has been suggested that the hummingbirds move between two different regions: the paramo and the forest below. If that happens to be true, their ecological role would be more important than we have thought they would move nutrients, genes, and energy between ecosystems. They might have a different ecological function compared to the other endemics.”

SELVA has also forged connections with the group, in the hopes of partnering with communities to determine how best to protect the species.

“You first need to understand what you want to protect or conserve,” says Botero-Delgadillo. “If we manage to understand what this species is doing and how important it is from an ecological point of view, maybe that will reveal other threats or aspects that we haven't seen yet that are really important to the conservation of the whole region, the whole ecosystem.”

The fact the Santa Marta Sabrewing is surviving amongst the community’s coffee and banana farms indicates to Lara that the community’s land use works for the hummingbird.

“Definitely, we have to explore more, but it seems the way they’re using the land is not a threat for the species,” he says.

What other messages the species may have to share at this point are unknown; but both research teams and the community are listening.