Birds
Quetzal
Pharomachrus · also called quetzals, resplendent quetzal
A quetzal is a bird that has carried symbolic weight for two thousand years. To the Maya and Aztec its shimmering green tail feathers were worth more than gold; to modern Guatemala it is the national bird, the name of the money, and a figure on the flag; and to nearly everyone it is a byword for freedom, because a captured quetzal is said to refuse to eat and die.
Overview
Quetzals are the genus Pharomachrus, five species of large, brilliant trogon in the montane cloud forests of Central and South America, between about 1,000 and 3,000 m. The famous one is the resplendent quetzal. They eat mainly the fruit of wild avocados and other laurels, swallowed whole with the pit regurgitated later, plus insects and small vertebrates — making them important seed dispersers.
Colour and the tail
The metallic green is a structural colour — feather microstructure scattering light, shifting green to gold to violet with the angle — while the breast is true crimson. A breeding male grows two tail-covert plumes up to a metre long, shed and regrown each year, that stream behind him in display flights.
Sacred, and a symbol
To the Maya and Aztec the quetzal was the bird of Quetzalcoatl, its feathers reserved for royalty and taken from birds that were plucked and released; killing one was a capital offence. Guatemala later made it the national bird and currency, and the “dies in a cage” belief cemented it as an emblem of liberty.
Status
Near Threatened and decreasing. The main threat is the clearing of montane cloud forest for farming and cattle, which removes both the fruiting trees and the large dead trunks quetzals need to nest in (their bills are too weak to excavate live wood), compounded by cage-bird capture and a warming climate pushing the cloud-forest zone upslope.
Quetzal: common questions
Why can you not keep a quetzal in captivity?
Wild-caught adult quetzals do very poorly in cages, and the traditional belief that a captured quetzal will pine and die gave the bird its status as a symbol of freedom. The reality is that quetzals are specialised, shy, cloud-forest fruit-eaters with exacting needs for humidity, temperature, space to fly, and a constant supply of the particular wild fruits they eat, and captured adults typically refuse food, become stressed, injure their long feathers and themselves against the enclosure, and die within a short time. Zoos have occasionally kept and even bred quetzals with enormous effort and specialised diets, but it is difficult, and the bird is best seen in the wild, which is one reason quetzal-watching tourism is now important to its conservation.
What is the difference between a quetzal and a trogon?
Quetzals are trogons. The trogon family, Trogonidae, contains around 45 species of stocky, big-headed, short-billed, colourful forest birds of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and the five quetzals, genus Pharomachrus, are the largest and most spectacular American members, distinguished by their size, their especially brilliant iridescence, a bushy crest, and, in breeding males, the greatly elongated tail-covert plumes. So every quetzal is a trogon, but most trogons are smaller birds without the long streamers, such as the elegant trogon of the southwestern United States and Mexico.
Why is the quetzal so important to Guatemala?
The resplendent quetzal has been a symbol of the region since long before Guatemala existed as a country. It was the sacred bird of the pre-Columbian Maya, whose rulers wore its tail feathers, and its name is tied to the god Quetzalcoatl. According to tradition, a quetzal flew over the Maya leader Tecun Uman as he fell fighting the Spanish, and its breast turned red with his blood. After independence, Guatemala adopted the quetzal as its national bird, put it on the flag and coat of arms, named its currency after it, and made it an emblem of the nation's freedom and identity, and the bird appears everywhere in Guatemalan culture and place names.
How far does the male quetzal's tail hang, and is it the real tail?
In a breeding male resplendent quetzal, the trailing plumes reach up to about a metre, sometimes a little more, well beyond the actual tail. They are not true tail feathers but greatly elongated upper tail coverts, the feathers that normally just cover the base of the tail, and they grow fresh each breeding season and are moulted afterwards. In flight they stream and ripple behind the bird, and during courtship the male performs fluttering display flights above the canopy that show them off. The plumes are fragile, and a male incubating in a cramped nest hole usually emerges at the end of the season with them broken and frayed.