[4][3][5] The blue-headed hummingbird was formally described in 1788 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae.

[6] Gmelin based his description on "Le saphir-ésmeraude" that been described in 1779 by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux.

[3] Genus Riccordia had originally been introduced in 1854 by the German ornithologist Ludwig Reichenbach with the Cuban emerald as the type species.

[13] Reichenbach based the genus name on the specific epithet of the type species recordii which had been chosen by Paul Gervais to honour the French surgeon-naturalist Alexandre Ricord (born 1798).

The tail is shining bronze whose outer feathers have a wide steel blue band near the end and large gray tips.

[15] The blue-headed hummingbird forages for nectar from a variety of flowering plants and trees; it feeds at all levels of the forest.

It builds a cup nest of soft plant fibers like those of the silk-cotton (kapok) tree Ceiba pentandra and usually decorates its outside with dead leaves.

"[15] The IUCN has assessed the blue-headed hummingbird as being Near Threatened, as it has a limited range and its population size is unknown and believed to be decreasing.