Sword-Billed Hummingbird: The Bird With the World’s Longest Bill
Sunday, 13 September 2026
The sword-billed hummingbird is a record-breaker (although blithely
oblivious to the fact, no doubt). The female
of the species is in possession of the longest bill in the world – with the
obvious caveat that this record is held with respect to body length. The longest ever recorded was 12 centimetres
long (that’s 4.7 inches). You can see in
the picture above a female sword-billed hummingbird next to a buff-tailed
coronet (which looks impressed) – and you can clearly see who the winner is here, at least in
terms of length. (image)
The scientific name for the sword-billed hummingbird is Ensifera
ensifera, and the name is derived from the Latin words for sword (ensis)
and carry (ferre). Together, the
words mean sword-wielder and never was there a more appropriate name for
a bird! It is a monotypic species, which
means that it has only one recognized subspecies or variety. So the sword-billed hummingbird is unique.
It lives in the Andean region of South America – and so its
region is geographically long and thin.
It is one of the largest of the hummingbird species and is, as you can
see, rather gorgeous to look at.
However, the one thing that will always stand out is the bill – it is
the only bird on the planet to have a bill longer than the rest of its body
(excluding the tail feathers). You might
well ask why it evolved such a long bill – and that’s because it drinks nectar
from local flowers with particularly long corollas (they are the long,
tube-like parts of the flowers), In fact
it coevolved with the passion flower Passiflora mixta.
Although we don’t really know how many there are, the
sword-billed hummingbird is not considered to be endangered – phew! Watch some
remarkable footage from the BBC’s Planet Earth II below.
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