Ornithocephalus numenius Toscano & Dressler 2000 Drawing by © Hamer and The Epidendra Website

Common Name The Numensis-Like Ornithocephalus [The Genus of the Curlew an allusion to the long curved rostellum]

Flower Size .16" [4 mm]

Found in Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica in wet montane forests at elevations around 1500 meters as a mini-miniature sized, cool, usually pendent growing epiphyte with a short stem enverloped completely by imbricating leaf sheaths and carrying, distichous, in a fan, bilaterally flattened, ensiform, narrowly elliptic to sub-linear, slightly incurved toward the acute apex, articulated below into the conduplicate base leaves that blooms in the winter through spring on an axillary, erect to arching, racemose, 1.2 to 3.2" [3 to 8 cm] long, laxly 4 to 10 flowered inflorescence with sterile ovate-lanceolate to cordate, clasping, keeled abaxially, ciliolate to crenulate margined acute bracts and similar floral bracts.

Similar to O gladiatus but differs in the narrower and longer leaves, the erect, incurved and oblong callus lobes of the prominent lip callus and the conspicuously longer beaked rostellum. In O gladiatus the leaves are oblanceolate and more clearly falcate, and the lip callus is smaller and more spreading and has narrower arcuate lobes.

Synonyms

References W3 Tropicos, Kew Monocot list , IPNI ; Icones Plantarum Tropicarum Plate 1065 Hamer 1984 as O gladiatus not drawing fide; *Lindleyana 15(4): 252–255. Toscano & Dressler 2000 drawing fide; Vanishing Beauty, Native Costa Rican Orchids Vol 2 Lacaena to Pteroglossa Pupulin 2020 photo fide

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