Green-breasted Mango

How to find it

Start by looking up. Around Tambor on the Nicoya Peninsula, most mangos stayed high, hawking insects, though one juvenile used a low perch. In hotel gardens and other urban green spaces, look for an occasional bird on a high perch, and check the flowering bushes where Rufous-tailed and Cinnamon Hummingbirds feed. Feeders a few feet from a Caribbean-foothill balcony can draw it alongside White-necked Jacobin, Green-crowned Brilliant and Crowned Woodnymph. Mangroves around Tárcoles and the road at Caldera have turned it up on tours. A short detour after La Fortuna, in the far central-north, typically produces it too, with Plain-breasted Ground-dove and Nicaraguan Seed-finch nearby.

How to recognise it

Males have glossy green upperparts and a narrow matte black stripe down the throat and chest, edged with blue-green. The outer tail feathers are deep magenta to wine purple with black tips. The bill is longish, black and slightly downcurved.

Females and young males look different. They have bronze-green backs and mostly white underparts, with a dark central stripe that is black at the chin and blue-green on the throat. Their outer tail is banded magenta and dark blue with white tips.

It is a fairly large hummingbird, about 11 to 12 cm long. Males average about 7.2 g and females about 6.8 g.

What it sounds like

Recording: John Matthew Erickson, CC BY 4.0, source, read 4 Nov 2026.

Behaviour and diet

This hummingbird goes after insects as much as nectar. In Costa Rica it is described as very insectivore-minded, sometimes catching insects in hovering flights very high in the air. It is rarely territorial. Across its range it also picks insects off plants and steals them from spider webs.

It visits the flowers of trees, especially legumes such as Inga, Caesalpinia and Erythrina, and also lianas.

The nest is a shallow cup of plant down, usually on the outermost branch of a tree. The female lays two white eggs and incubates them for 16 to 17 days, and the chicks stay in the nest about 24 more days.

Where it lives

In Costa Rica it likes savannas, coffee plantations and other semi-open areas with scattered tall trees. It also uses the edges of gallery forest, mangroves and tall second growth.

It occurs on the Caribbean slope. On the Pacific slope it reaches the Central Valley and Bahía Ballena in the southwest.

Across its range it is most common from sea level to about 500 m, and in Central American mountains it reaches up to about 1500 m. It is also found in gardens, parks, towns and farmland such as banana and citrus.

Similar birds

It looks very like the Black-throated Mango. The male has less black below, but both can look all black in the field. Females are almost impossible to separate, though the Green-breasted has more coppery tones on the upperparts.

The Veraguan Mango also looks very similar. It has a blue stripe down the breast, while the Green-breasted Mango's stripe is black, in both sexes.

Names and lore in Costa Rica

In Costa Rica the bird is called colibrí manguito pechiverde or manguito pechiverde. Elsewhere it is called mango pechiverde, colibrí garganta negra in Mexico, and manguito colipúrpura in Nicaragua.

Status and conservation

The AOCR list marks it as a resident (R), and the IUCN lists it as Least Concern.

Photography tips

Patience matters. A Costa Rican writer followed a nesting female through high branches for almost an hour to photograph her, and the nest turned out to be a small cup of moss and lichen on a thick branch. Flowering trees and feeders give more settled views than chasing a bird through the canopy.