BirdLife International

The gorgeted puffleg [eriocnemis isabellaea].

A rare hummingbird that boasts a plumage of violet blue and iridescent green on its throat has been discovered living in the cloud forests of southwestern Colombia, researchers announced Sunday.

But they warned that the newly-discovered bird, the gorgeted puffleg, is in danger from the slash and burn system of the region's coca crops, the raw material used in the production of cocaine, according to the AP.

The species belongs to the puffleg genus, which appear to have "little cotton balls above their legs," said Luis Mazariegos-Hurtado, who has spent 30 years documenting hummingbirds and founded the Colombian Hummingbird Conservancy

Investigators caught their first glimpse of the bird while surveying a mountain ridge in the Cauca province in 2005.

Braving the zone's leftist rebels and drug traffickers, they returned to confirm the sighting.

There are concerns over the bird's future because the Serrania del Pinche mountains where it was discovered are unprotected, according to ornithologists Alexander Cortés-Diago and Luis Alfonso Ortega, who made three sightings of the new hummingbird during surveys in 2005 of montane cloud forest in the Serrania del Pinche, south-west Colombia.

“We were essentially following a hunch,” said Alexander Cortés-Diago of The Hummingbird Conservancy (Colombia) and co-discoverer of Gorgeted Puffleg. “We had heard that a new species of plant had been discovered in the region in 1994. This discovery and the isolation of the Serrania led us to believe there could also be new species of vertebrates.”

For more information, check out the story in Birdlife International.