Nazca hummingbird
One of the best known Nazca lines: a bird drawn on the desert floor of southern Peru with a long straight bill, spread wings and a long pointed tail. A 2019 study identified it as a hermit, a kind of hummingbird of Peru’s northern and eastern forests.
Meaning
The hummingbird is one of the animal figures made on the Pampa Colorada by the Nazca culture, whose lines, Britannica says, mostly show plants and animals. Britannica gives its length as about 50 metres (165 feet). Birds are the commonest subject of all: Archaeology magazine counts sixteen bird figures, more than any other plant or animal. Andina names “el famoso colibrí” among the birds of the pampa. In Andean animal symbolism, as the anthropologist Johan Reinhard reads it for National Geographic, hummingbirds were a sign of fertility.
Origin and history
The figure was long described simply as a hummingbird. In 2019 the zooarchaeologist Masaki Eda of the Hokkaido University Museum and his team compared the bills, necks, tails, wings and feet of the Nazca birds with those of birds known in Peru. They concluded, Archaeology reports, that this one is a hermit, a hummingbird told apart by its long, pointed tail. NOVA adds that hermits are tropical hummingbirds of northern and eastern Peru. None of the birds the team identified live in the Nazca region. Eda also warned against reading every figure as a real species: “I think some of them combined the traits of several different birds.”
The 2014 Greenpeace banner
On 8 December 2014, Global Voices reported, Greenpeace activists from seven countries laid large yellow cloth letters near the hummingbird, reading “Time for change! The future is renewable”. The site is usually seen only from the air: even ministers, Global Voices noted, need special permission and special footwear to walk on it. After an inspection, Peru’s Ministry of Culture reported Greenpeace to the prosecutor for damage to the archaeological heritage. In 2017 a court in Ica gave the activist Wolfgang Sadik a suspended sentence of three years and four months and ordered compensation of S/650,000 (about US$198,170); Andina reports that he accepted responsibility for what it calls permanent damage to the figure.
Read next
- Next in Andean and Inca symbolsNazca monkeyA monkey drawn on the desert floor of southern Peru, about 110 metres long, with its tail wound into a spiral. It is one of the large animal figures of the Nazca lines, made by the Nazca culture about 2,000 years ago.
- The hummingbird in other traditionsHummingbird symbolismThe bird of Huitzilopochtli, patron god of the Mexica (Aztecs), whose name means “hummingbird of the south” or “of the left”. The Nahuas believed the souls of warriors killed in battle came back to earth as hummingbirds or butterflies; in Cherokee stories the hummingbird is the bird small and fast enough to steal back tobacco.
See also
Nazca lines, Nazca spider, Gateway of the Sun (the Staff God), Tumi (ceremonial knife), Inti (the Inca sun), Inti Raymi (festival of the sun).
Sources
- Nazca Lines, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Internet Archive copy, 2026), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Introduction
- Partially Identified Flying Objects, Archaeology, September/October 2019 (Archaeological Institute of America), Archaeology magazine, article text
- Peru’s Nazca Line etchings depict bird species not native to the area, NOVA, PBS, June 2019, PBS NOVA, article text
- Nasca lines, National Geographic, History and Culture, National Geographic, article text
- Líneas de Nasca: misterio e historia que deslumbran al mundo, Agencia Andina (Peru’s state news agency), November 2016, Agencia Peruana de Noticias Andina, article text
- For Peru, Greenpeace pulled an unforgivable stunt at their 1,500-year-old Nazca lines site, Global Voices, 12 December 2014, Global Voices, article text
- Peru: Greenpeace activist given suspended prison sentence for damaging Nazca Lines, Agencia Andina, May 2017, Agencia Peruana de Noticias Andina, article text
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves or lines.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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