Quetzals
They're resplendent
[ed. note: DHS/ICE sucks. Support Minnesota orgs here and Maine orgs here.]
I didn’t mean for this to become Q week, but sometimes that happens, you know? As it turns out, animals that start with Q are pretty cute and awesome (s/o also to quails). Quetzals might be the cutest bird that you haven’t heard of.
Though quetzals are a whole blended family (Trogonidae) with the trogons and there are six species across two genra (though one species, the eared quetzal, lives in its own genus, so it’s really like 1.17 genra), the most famous is the resplendent quetzal and HECK YEAH THEY ARE. They are spectacular, they are beautiful, they are the moment.
If the camera adds ten pounds to people, it removes inches from the resplendent quetzal; though still relatively small as birds go, it is not nearly as small as it seems - with bodies slightly longer than a foot and then absolutely extraordinary tail feathers (technically coverts and not feathers, but I don’t really understand the difference and thus am going to ignore it) that can add another three feet when fully grown.
If you spot a quetzal in its native Central American cloud forest habitat, it’s probably a male, as they are the only ones with the long tail feathers - er, coverts and the boss mohawk head crests. However, it’s not an easy feat, spotting a quetzal, considering that they’ve evolved to be flashy for their potential mates and blend into the forest for everyone else and particularly predators. The word quetzal comes from the Nahuatl Aztec word which means basically ‘quetzal tail feather’ and then ‘quetzal-feather bird’, so it’s a real logical and philosophical conundrum - was the bird named after its feathers, or the feathers after the bird?
The birds, and particularly their tail feathers are suuuuuuper important to both the Aztec and Maya cultures. The extreme mucky-mucks aka rulers wore crowns adorned with quetzal feathers; in Mayan culture, quetzal tail feathers were so precious that they were used as a medium of exchange, a tradition that lives on to this day in the Guatemalan currency, which is the quetzal.
Though they look, to our weak and unsophisticated human eyes, to be green with red bellies, they are actually brown! It’s their iridescence that shimmers green, lime, ultramarine, cobalt, all the good colors, frankly. The females are a bit duller (in color only, their personalities *~sparkle~*), featuring more greys such as on the belly. They still want to be camouflaged, but unlike the males, they are in demand and don’t have to dress to impress.
Unlike quokkas, you can actually play quetzals in Scrabble (for an astonishing 25 points!), and you’re likely to win — they’re notoriously bad spellers.
