Hummingbirds
Poster 19×27 inches – Recycled Algae paper, beige 250 gr. Color pencil, each poster comes with a flyer with information about distribution and diet + stickers.
In the sugar-charged lives of the world’s smallest birds, sexual selection has taken over, with males vying for mates by competing in leks or defending rich nectar resources. Hummingbirds showcase a dizzying array of plumages, almost all of which rely on odd tail plumes or the angle-sensitive iridescence of their feathers for their effect. The extreme maneuverability of these most acrobatic of birds seems to engender a lack of concern about predators, making them easy to approach near sources of food. Burning energy so fast during the day that most species cannot make it through the night on a stomach full of nectar, most go into torpor every night, even in tropical environments, to reduce energy loss.
Toucans of Costa Rica
Poster 19×27 inches – Recycled Algae paper, beige 250 gr. Color pencil, each poster comes with a flyer with information about distribution and diet + stickers.
Small to medium-sized non-passerines with enormous and colorfully patterned bills, toucans have become familiar to many through their frequent appearance in popular culture and marketing. They eat a great deal of fruit, but they also supplement this diet with large amounts of animal material. In many areas in the Neotropics, toucans are some of the most important predators on the nests of other birds, and they are sometimes the focus of intense aggression by bands of passerine birds. The distinctive bill, with nostrils atop the very base, serves with its large radiative surface to shed excess heat for the many species that spend much time in the upper forest canopy exposed to the hot tropical sun.
Trogons of Costa Rica
Poster 19×27 inches – Recycled Algae paper, beige 250 gr. Color pencil, each poster comes with a flyer with information about distribution and diet + stickers.
These generalist foragers of tropical forests often reveal their presence only by their deep whistled or chuckled calls. Once spotted, trogons can be distinguished by their hunched shoulders and long tails, and their underparts of bright yellow, red, or orange and upperparts of iridescent dark green or blue or matte cinnamon make a feast for the eyes. Sexual dimorphism in trogons grows most extreme in the quetzals, in which even the males, with their spectacularly long tail coverts, take an active role in incubating and feeding chicks in their tree-hole nest. Males sometimes aggregate loosely for days at a time early in the breeding season, but why they do so remains unclear.