In 2022, an ornithologist discovered the shimmering emerald and cobalt blue feathers of the Santa Marta Whiskerwing high in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in northern Colombia. It is a large hummingbird that has only been documented twice since 1879. As the bird sat on a branch, ornithologist Yurgen Vega took pictures.
It was once lost to science, but has now been found.
The bird was on the American Bird Conservancy’s Ten Most Wanted list, which tops a longer registry of “lost birds.” Birds are officially defined as those whose discovery has not been documented by photographs, audio or genetic evidence for at least a decade.
A primary goal of the list is to encourage birdwatchers and others to look for these birds in the wild and bring back evidence that the birds are not extinct.
People have been searching for lost birds for decades, but in 2020 the conservation organization formalized this process as the Search for Lost Birds project in collaboration with two other groups, Re:wild and BirdLife International.
Researchers from the groups published a paper in June with a definitive list of birds that need to be found. They combed through millions of photos, videos and audio recordings in bird-watching databases such as iNaturalist and xeno-canto. The study concluded that 144 bird species have been lost to science but may still exist.
“Through a stronger presence in global ornithological and birdwatching networks, there is great potential to learn more about birds that are little known and highly threatened,” said Cameron Rutt, the paper’s lead author, who until recently coordinated the project for the American Bird Conservancy.
Once the birds are documented, experts analyze how to protect and study them. Since the rediscovery of the Santa Marta avocets, for example, researchers have been studying the birds’ habitat requirements and biology and recently published an article about their findings.
They have identified five small populations of these birds, about 50 individuals, in a small forested valley at the mouth of the Guatapurí River in Colombia. The pipit population is a case of microendemism, experts say, a species restricted to a small, specific location. It is considered to be in danger of extinction.
Finding a species brings a new list of challenges. How best to protect them, whether from storms, climate change or crowds of people? Esteban Botero-Delgadillo, director of conservation science at SELVA, a Colombian conservation organization, said he and others were concerned that “if this news got out, a lot of birdwatchers and people would go hunting.”
Because of this, he added, “they were very vague about where it was for over a year.” The bird is on Indigenous land, which makes management more complicated.
Violence can be a threat in the habitat of some extinct birds. The rediscovery of a small group of Yellow-eared Parrots, striking green birds with yellow markings, in western Colombia in 1999 led to the creation of a reserve. The population grew to thousands.
In 2021, the environmentalist who had brought the population to healthy levels, Gonzalo Cardona, was shot dead by an unknown criminal gang and his body buried in a shallow grave. Botero-Delgadillo said his team also had to be cautious on the ground.
Another recently found bird on the top 10 list is the Black-naped Pheasant-dove. The chicken-sized bird was found in a remote region of Papua New Guinea in 2022 after being undetectable for 126 years.
Even if the existence of a bird has not been scientifically documented for a long time, this does not mean that it is lost to the local population. To find the pheasant dove, the most endangered land bird in Papua New Guinea, researchers traveled to the villages where the bird was last seen.
Among them was John C. Mittermeier, founder of the Search for Lost Birds Project. “The people who live there are mostly subsistence farmers, fishermen and hunters, so they know the land and the wildlife very, very well,” he said. “We asked them if they had seen this species,” whose local name is Auwo.
One day, one of the birds was strutting around in front of a camera trap.
“When I first saw the photos of the pheasant dove, it felt like I had found a unicorn,” Mittermeier said. “It’s the kind of moment that you dream about your whole life as a conservationist and bird watcher.”
Three species in North America are considered extinct. The most famous is the ivory-billed woodpecker. Its last generally recognized sighting in the United States was in Louisiana in 1944. It was spotted again in Cuba in 1987. There have been no confirmed sightings since then. Due to grainy video that may show the bird, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has not declared the bird extinct.
The other two birds in North America are the Eskimo curlew and the Bachman’s warbler.
It didn’t take long for some of the 144 birds lost during the project to be found; more than a dozen have already been found. The first came before the article was published: the Mussau Warbler, a small bird with a long tail and long wings, was photographed in Papua New Guinea in June by Joshua Bergmark, a guide with Ornis Birding Expeditions.
Mittermeier was delighted with the news, and his joy increased even more this week when the project announced that the Plains Thrush had been documented in Bolivia.
“The enthusiasm of people around the world gives me hope that we may find more of these lost birds,” he said.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
