Meet This Rare Bird That Can't Stop And Won't Stop Eating Avocados

Almost everyone seems to love avocados because they are creamy, tasty, and make a great addition to most meals — including your campsite burritos and various other campfire recipes. However, what you may not have known is that there is a bird that might just love avocados more than you: the resplendent quetzal. Resplendent quetzals (or just quetzals for short) are typically found in the rainforests of Central America and Southern Mexico and are bright and beautiful birds with iridescent green mohawks, bright red bellies, and a long green tail feathers that were considered to be so sacred that they were used to make the headdresses worn by Aztec kings. Another interesting thing about quetzals is that they have a voracious appetite for avocados and swallow them whole.

However, if you grow standard grocery store avocados, there's no need to worry or start putting out shiny CDs to banish these fruit-eating birds from your trees because quetzals only eat wild avocados that grow in high-altitude rainforests, often called cloud forests. These wild avocados are much smaller than the ones that humans normally eat and are even in a different plant family. Often called little avocados or "aguacatillos" in Spanish, wild avocados are typically round and have much less fruit meat than a standard store-bought avocado. In fact, wild avocados are mostly made of a large hard seed making them rather unappetizing to most humans but delicious to a few rare tropical birds, including the resplendent quetzal. However, when it comes to wild avocados and quetzals, it looks like the relationship is not one sided.

At first glance, it may appear that the beautiful quetzals just love devouring wild avocados to the point where they specifically migrate up to cloud forests during the period when the wild avocado trees fruit (February to June or July). However, as it turns out, the avocado trees also benefit from the quetzals because when these colorful birds eat the wild avocados, they digest the meat of the fruit and then regurgitate the seed in a new location. 

This helps to spread the seeds of the avocado tree and is necessary for the health and growth of the forest. Without the quetzals and other birds that eat and spread the pits of wild avocados, the seeds would simply fall to the ground below the parent tree and have to compete with the large adult tree for light and nutrients. Because of this, quetzals and wild avocado trees are thought to have a symbiotic relationship, in which both species benefit greatly from their partnership. Therefore, to protect the beautiful avocado-loving quetzal, it is also important to protect wild avocado trees and vice versa.