BLUE-CROWNED MOTMOT

Probably the most gorgeous bird in the cenote area is the Blue-crowned Motmot, Momotus momota. I hear him several times each day, a hollow, slightly hoarse, clucking, rhythmic KLUK-KLUK-KLUK, and see him maybe every other day, for he's a bit shy, usually only glimpsed gliding from one shadowy spot to the next. Therefore the other day when I was invisible (sitting perfectly still among boulders at the cenote's edge) I was tickled when he landed about 20 feet away in good view. Painfully slowly I worked the camera up and shot the front and back pictures shown below.

In the picture the head seems to have a blue halo, so you might think that I've used PhotoShop to enhance the bird's blueness, but I haven't. In weak light I was shooting with a slow shutter speed, 1/40th sec, and the blueness is just foggy glare from shiny leaves behind him, something that happens at slow speeds. That bird is every bit as colorful as he seems, even more in sunlight.

Blue-crowned, which are about 16 inches long (40 cm) are distributed from Mexico to Peru and northern Argentina. Around here they're pretty common, even along weedy roadsides and beside cornfields.

The extraordinary thing about motmots, of which six species occur in Mexico, is that in most species the shafts of their very long tail feathers display bare spots toward the end, as seen in the photos. Moreover, often as they perch they twitch their tails back and forth like the pendulum of a clock.

Motmots nest in burrows excavated in banks, root masses of fallen trees, and other locations where tunnels can be made. A story the Maya tell their kids is that the naked spots on the motmot's tail result from a day when an ancestor escaped his enemy by rushing into his burrow, but he forgot to pull in his long tail. As the world passed by outside brushing the tail, part of the tail got rubbed naked! I read that motmots remove barbs from their own tail-feather shafts to create the vacant spot.

Motmots eat invertebrates, small vertebrates and fruit.