Brace's Emerald

Chlorostilbon bracei (English Brace 's Emerald, not a German name) is an extinct hummingbird species that was native to New Providence, the main island of the Bahamas.

Description

The body length was 9.5 cm, the wing length 11.4 cm, and the tail length of 2.7 cm. The black beak was slightly curved and conically pointed. The feet were black. The back had a bronze -green color with a golden shimmer. The head was similar colored back, but it had no gold shimmer. Directly behind the eyes there was a white spot. The throat shimmered in the magnificent blue-green tones. On the belly feathers were green and had ash-gray peaks. The wings had a purple tint. The tail feathers were greenish. The under tail-coverts were gray with a faint cinnamon-colored tint around the edges.

Status and extinction

Chlorostilbon was bracei over 100 years only by a single male specimen known that the American bird collector Lewis Jones Knight Brace 4.8 km from Nassau imposed on July 13, 1877 located in the inland of New Providence. The bellows, which is severely damaged by the throat, is now in the Smithsonian Institution. This small hummingbird was long ignored by the experts. 1880, the kind without comment as a synonym for the Cuba Emerald Hummingbird ( Chlorostilbon ricordii ) was listed. Until the 1930s, the unique status of the holotype was not considered at all and you could see him as a copy of the Cuban Emerald Hummingbird, which just happened to be stranded on New Providence. 1945 listed him the American ornithologist James Bond as a subspecies Chlorostilbon ricordii bracei and made for the first time on the differences between Chlorostilbon ricordii and Chlorostilbon bracei attention. In contrast to the Cuban race the instance of New Providence was smaller, had a long beak and a different plumage. 1982 made ​​the two paleontologists William Hilgartner and Storrs Lovejoy Olson at research in a cave on New Providence a sensational discovery. They found fossil bones from the Pleistocene of three different species of hummingbirds. The three species were the fossil giant hummingbird philodice evelynae, Chlorostilbon ricordii and a way that you bracei identified as Chlorostilbon later. Since the bone finds of Chlorostilbon ricordii and Chlorostilbon bracei differed greatly, was now proven that Brace had discovered a new species of bird that lived since the Pleistocene on New Providence. She made a relict population and probably died by habitat loss and human disturbances end of the 19th century.