Jamaican tody
Todus todus
— Where the name comes from
Todus was the name of a tiny bird in Latin, mentioned by the grammarian Festus without anyone knowing which bird it was. Linnaeus revived it for these Caribbean birds, and tody has remained their common name. In Jamaica it is called robin redbreast, for its red throat.
— Facts
- Group
- Birds · Aves
- Order
- Rollers and kingfishers
- Habitat
- Forest of every kind, from lowland to mountain
- Range
- Endemic to Jamaica
- Size
- 9–11 cm, 5–7 g
- Diet
- Insects and spiders taken from beneath leaves
- Lifespan
- A few years
— Characteristics
- 01
It has a bright green back, a red throat and a broad, flat bill.
- 02
It hunts by darting from a twig to snatch insects from the undersides of leaves.
- 03
It digs its nest in a tunnel up to thirty centimetres long in an earth bank.
— What sets it apart
Today todies live only in the Greater Antilles, roughly one species per island, but it was not always so. Fossils of a tody some thirty million years old have been found in France and Germany, and other remains come from Wyoming: the family was widespread across the northern hemisphere, and has survived only in one corner of the Caribbean. The Jamaican tody is thus the last representative, on a single island, of a lineage that once flew over Europe too.
