The Queztal

The quetzal, or resplendent trogon, is a rare jewel of the bird world. Many birdwatchers travel to Costa Rica simply to catch sight of this magnificent creature. What this pigeon-size bird lacks in physical stature it makes up for in audacious plumage: vivid, shimmering green that ignites in the sunshine, flashing emerald to golden and back to iridescent green. As is common in bird species, the male outshines the female. He sports a fuzzy pink hairdo, a scintillating crimson belly, and two brilliant green tail plumes edged in snowy white and sinuous as feather boas.

Its beauty was so fabled and the bird so elusive that early European naturalists believed the quetzal was a fabrication of Central American indigenous people. In 1861 an English naturalist, Osbert Salvin, wrote that he was "determined, rain or no rain, to be off to the mountain forests in search of quetzals, to see and shoot, which has been a daydream for me ever since I set foot in Central America." Salvin, the first European to record observing a quetzal, pronounced it "unequaled for splendour among the birds of the New World," and promptly shot it. During the course of the next three decades, thousands of quetzal plumes crossed the Atlantic to fill the specimen cabinets of European collectors and supply fashionable milliners' shops of Paris, Amsterdam, and London. Salvin redeemed himself by writing the awesome 40-volume tome Biologia Centrali Americana, which provided a virtually complete catalog of neotropical species.