Happy Easter to all of you celebrating today. I wanted to share this beautiful little bird with you this week because these birds are as colourful as Easter eggs!
The most famous bird in Cuba doesn’t exactly have the most spectacular name; the Cuban Tody doesn’t exactly drum up the rainbow of colours that are this tiny bird.
The Cuban Tody is the most common bird in Cuba and is adaptable to nearly every habitat. They usually dig tunnels into embankments or hollow tree trunks to create their nest and may start excavating burrows as early as September. These tunnels, though are not the tunnels used for eggs. Instead, they are used as nighttime refuges for the adult birds during the weeks while the egg tunnel is being constructed.
During the creation of their nest the two, male and female, todies take turns digging into the embankment or tree trunk (Alexander). They cover the tunnel walls with a sealant, which is a mixture of grass, algae, feathers, and lichen.
They nest in a tunnel most often dug into a clay embankment and occasionally in a rotten tree trunk. Their burrow is around 30 cm in length. In the tunnels they create sharp turns to discourage predators and at the end of each tunnel construct a chamber that holds an average of two to three fragile, glossy white eggs which are the smallest in their genus.
Both parents may incubate and provide care for nestlings which can demand feeding up to 140 times per day!
I was so thrilled to finally see this little bird in person and I was happy to get some amazing photos to remember my encounter.