Turquoise-browed Motmot — printable fact sheet

Did you know?

• Unlike most birds, the Turquoise-browed Motmot's tail feathers naturally lose barbs near the tip, giving them their unique racket shape without the bird needing to preen them into form.
• The racket-tipped tail is not grown that way: the barbs above the tip are loose and simply fall off as the bird preens. Motmots wag the tail like a pendulum when they spot a predator, effectively telling it that the ambush has failed. Hand-raised motmots avoid red-and-yellow ringed patterns without ever having seen a coral snake, one of the clearest cases of innate predator recognition in birds. They nest in tunnels dug into earth banks, sometimes over a metre deep.