A marvelous hummingbird video at the BBC today

The amazing mating display of the marvellous spatuletail hummingbird has been filmed in full for the first time.

The spatuletail hummingbird is among the most rare and striking of birds... Unusually among hummingbirds, the bird has just four tail feathers. In males, two of these feathers grow to three or four times the bird's body length, each ending in a large violet-blue disc; the spatule..

"Hummingbirds do everything at super high speed. He would do a dance with a twig where he hops over and over backwards and forwards across it mid air. He'd do that 14 times in seven seconds. It's really really quick."

The video is not embeddable, so if you are interested you will need to watch the video at the BBC link.

There's one interesting collateral effect of creating nature films:

"It's a poor area. The kids, instead of playing Nintendo DS's, they'd shoot hummingbirds with catapults... But now they've realised they can make a bit of money from tourists, it's completely changed the culture. If any of the kids get caught with a sling shot they get teased by the other kids."

Still photo credit.