Species of the day: scale-crested pigmy tyrant! We caught this bird in one of the large cloud forest patches a few days ago. The ‘crest’ is perhaps used to make it seem bigger and more ferocious to enemies (hard to imagine this bird looking any MORE ferocious no?) Oh, and the chicks dig it too.

On another note, our research seems to be going well. We are now testing experimentally whether flowers can tell the difference between green hermits, violet sabrewings and stripe-throated hermits. Here is a photo of Ava with a hermit we just banded (note bird’s right leg) as it was about to take off.