Guadalupe West Indies

The hummingbird is a bird of the family Trochilidae. It’s one of the smallest birds in the world, although its main feature is the fact that it is the only bird which can easily hover in the air and fly backwards. It usually has a bright and colourful plumage, mainly metallic green. The male neck is often bright red, blue or emerald green.

The hummingbirds’ family comprises 100 kinds of birds, which are divided into more than 300 species. These birds live mainly on flowers nectar to gain calories in order to fly properly. They obtain proteins from little insects. This diet based only on simple carbohydrates is rich in energy and compulsory to make its extremely exigent flying style possible (flapping their wings up to 80 times per second). Another special feature of the hummingbird is its beak, which size is almost always different from one species to another. Each beak is specially designed for one kind of flowers. This distinction allows the hummingbird to fit in an ecological niche and avoids fights between species.

The most common species that you might see in Guadeloupe are the Antillean crested hummingbird (Orthorhyncus cristatus), the blue-headed hummingbird (Cyanophaia bicolor), the purple-throated Carib (Eulampis jugularis), the green-throated Carib (Eulampis holosericeus), the white-necked Jacobin (Florisuga mellivora) and the ruby-topaz hummingbird (Chrysolampis mosquitus). If you’re a photographer, you should find it easy to take a perfect picture of a hummingbird, while it’s fluttering to feed on a flower. It’s worth a good souvenir! If you go for it, don’t worry, as you’ll have many opportunities to meet one of them. No surprise that the hummingbird is one of the symbols of Guadeloupe.