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Art by Barry Kent MacKay

(Artwork - 243)
Lesson's Motmot (Momotus lessonii)

There was a little motmot
With a little dot dot
Right in the middle of her breast.
When she was good, she was very, very good,
But when she was naughty was the best.

Okay…I was just a kid, and stuck to painting, not poetry. I had never seen a motmot and yet even then I was fascinated that according to pictures in my books on birds, there was a range of unrelated birds that had a spot or dark splotch in the middle of the chest, and included a species of goose, quite a few sparrows, and motmots. Why? I still don’t know.

Fast forward a couple of decades and I was making my second visit to the tropics, having landed the day before in San Jose, Costa Rica, and I was all agog and anxious to see exotic birds. I had been told to visit the local university grounds. I saw lots on the way but no new species, and no member of a family not found in Canada, until I peered through some bushes and saw, staring back at me from very nearby, a spectacular looking creature that in those days was known as a Blue-crowned Motmot. THIS, I thought, is what an exotic tropical bird should look like.

Taxonomists have divided what was once thought to be just one species into various distinct species found from southern Mexico deep into South America, all looking quite a lot alike. However, each is both visually and geographically distinctive.

Most of the motmot species sport unusual tail feathers, with the central tail feathers being the longest and having a long, bare stretch of shaft ending in a “flag” of webbing at the tip, a condition called “racquet-tailed”. Put simply, the structure of the webbing between the base of the feather and the tip is structurally weak, lacking some supportive pigments, and while present as the feathers are growing, then quickly erodes away. They are jay-sized, weighing about 97 to 148 grams.

The species is named after French naturalist-explorer, René Primevère Lesson (1794 – 1849). Such eponymous names have fallen into strong disfavor so I expect Lesson’s Motmot will soon be renamed, again. Whatever they are called, these birds epitomize to me how an exotic tropical bird should look.

The original painting is dedicated to the memory of Cecil Fran Underwood (1862 – 1943) whose bird specimens in the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum I have so often used to help me attain ornithological accuracy in my portrayal of Costa Rican birds. The painting is in oils on compressed hardboard, approximately life size, and is 24 by 18 inches.

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