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endlingmusings · 2 years ago

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[ A dusky tetraka photographed by John C. Mittermeier. ]

“Dusky Tetraka, a small olive and yellow-throated bird that hops around on the ground and has eluded ornithologists for 24 years, was rediscovered by an expedition team searching the tropical forests of northeastern Madagascar. The expedition team, led by The Peregrine Fund’s Madagascar Program, found the species in two different remote sites: one on the Masoala peninsula in late December 2022 and another near Andapa in January this year. The last documented sighting of Dusky Tetraka was in 1999, making it one of the top 10 most wanted lost birds by the Search for Lost Birds, a collaboration between Re:wild, American Bird Conservancy and BirdLife International.

“Now that we’ve found Dusky Tetraka and better understand the habitat it lives in, we can look for it in other parts of Madagascar, and learn important information about its ecology and biology,” said Lily-Arison Rene de Roland, Madagascar Program director for The Peregrine Fund, and expedition leader. “There is a lot of biodiversity still to discover in Madagascar.””

- Excerpt from “Found: Mysterious songbird rediscovered in Madagascar after eluding scientists for 24 years” via BirdLife International.

#Dusky tetraka #Bird #DD #Article #Photo #Live specimen #Wild #Lazarus species

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a-smol-frost-birb · 2 years ago

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Bird Feared Extinct Spotted First Time After 24 Years

Oh snap??? 👀

#unclear if this counts as a #lazarus species #but!!!#dusky tetraka #birds

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science-for-the-masses · 2 years ago

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#Science #science communication #scicomm #Stem #Science education #Science blog #environmental science #endangered species #Birds #Animals

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kamreadsandrecs · 1 year ago

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By Penny Sarchet

Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of diving deep into the Search For Lost Birds, an initiative that’s steering the world’s army of birdwatchers, conservationists and researchers towards finding 10 of the most enigmatic and important bird species lost to science. There have already been some successes – including the extraordinary rediscoveries of both the Santa Marta sabrewing and the dusky tetraka. Now, an extensive search is underway in New Zealand for the mysterious South Island kōkako, which has become a surprising icon for the nation’s struggle to save its unique bird species from invasive predatory mammals.

There are no photographs of the South Island kōkako, a large blue-grey bird with two fleshy orange flaps known as wattles at the base of its curved black bill. Like many of New Zealand’s endemic bird species, it suffered great losses due to deforestation and the introduction of mammals such as ship rats, stoats and feral cats. The last accepted sighting of the species was in 1967, and it was declared extinct in 2007 – however, a sighting that same year led to its reclassification as “data deficient”. In 2010, the South Island Kōkako Charitable Trust was set up to find it and has been searching ever since.

In 2017, the trust launched a public campaign, asking anyone going deep into backcountry areas to look for the bird and report sightings. “After that, we started getting heaps of reports,” trust manager Inger Perkins told me, but no one has yet won the NZ$10,000 the trust is offering for evidence confirming the elusive bird’s existence.

The campaign, though, has helped make New Zealanders care about this missing bird in a country that’s already filled with unusual and threatened bird species, from the kiwi to the kākāpō. Perkins says that before the trust began drumming up interest, the South Island kōkako got very little attention. There was, however, awareness of the closely related North Island kōkako – very similar except that its face wattles are blue – which has been brought back from the edge of extinction and features on the nation’s $50 bills.

Like many of New Zealand’s recent conservation successes, the preservation of the North Island kōkako has involved thorough efforts to kill mammalian predators. “Wherever it’s surviving, it’s needing regular and intensive trapping to keep the predators down,” says Perkins.

The future of many of New Zealand’s birds depends on the success of Predator Free 2050, an ambitious and difficult project to eliminate rats, European stoats and Australian possums from New Zealand by the middle of this century. Trapping and killing these mammals is one technique that’s being used. Another is dropping poisoned bait by helicopter in unpopulated areas.

“There’s a huge lot of people who just hate the idea of poisoning the forests. But it’s the only major tool, particularly in large, remote areas, for predator control,” says Perkins. She says that projects like the search for the South Island kōkako help to get the public on board with these kinds of measures, helping people to realise that “our forests are not what they used to be, and we do need predator control”.

So, how do you go about finding a South Island kōkako? One intriguing line of inquiry is collecting and analysing audio recordings – a surprising tack to take, given that no definitive recording of the bird’s call exists. However, it’s thought to sound something like its North Island cousin, and to be a haunting call with organ and flute-like notes and some other sounds mixed in.

Using this as a starting point, mathematician Stephen Marsland at Victoria University of Wellington algorithmically generated every conceivable variation of this kind of call, and has used these to comb billions of hours of audio recordings from different locations for possible South Island kōkako calls. In this way, his team was able to identify 250 possible calls, and then narrowed these down further to only five, which are now under review by experts.

But in all the 13 years that the trust has been looking for the South Island kōkako, no definitive evidence has yet come to light. Every year at the trust’s annual meeting, Perkins says they ask themselves, “Is there still value in us putting this effort in?”

What could be the trust’s final searches are now underway, scouring key areas in the north-west of the South Island. “It’s going to be more recorders, more cameras, more hands on the ground – almost like a police search across the hillside where there’s been a murder,” says Perkins.

I’m waiting eagerly for news of how these searches have gone. In a country filled with charismatic bird species, I can’t quite believe that the South Island kōkako has garnered so much attention, with passionate volunteers manning extensive and difficult searches.

But speaking to Perkins helped me understand the wider significance of such projects – even if the South Island kōkako is never found, it has acted as a conservation icon, helping us all to understand what’s at stake in New Zealand.

#science #biology #conservation

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kammartinez · 1 year ago