Northern giant hummingbird

The northern giant hummingbird (Patagona chaski) is the largest species of hummingbird and one of two species of the genus Patagona.

It and the sympatric southern giant hummingbird (P. gigas) were once considered the same species, i.e., the giant hummingbird, but genomic analysis shows that the two species diverged between 2.1 and 3.4 million years ago, in the late Pliocene.

A single F1 male hybrid between the two species has been recorded in a study that collected a sample of 101 individuals, suggesting that hybridization occurs regularly between the species. However, high genome-wide FST between the two species shows that introgression and backcrossing of first generation hybrids occurs very rarely in nature, such that there is no gene flow occurring between the two species.