An Incredibly Rare Bird Has Been Rediscovered in Brazil
An Incredibly Rare Bird Has Been Rediscovered in Brazil
The blue-eyed ground dove has only been spotted on a handful of occasions—now, one researcher photographed it for the first time.
by Jessie Guy-Ryan
May 22, 2016
An 1893 illustration of the blue-eyed ground dove. Until recently, the bird had never been photographed. (Illustration: John Gerrard Keulemans/Public Domain)
In 2015, the IUCN Red List, which assesses the conservation status of animals and plants worldwide, listed 218 bird species as critically endangered. One of the rarest species on the list is the blue-eyed ground dove; the species’ population is so small that it has only been observed a handful of times, most recently in 2007. But this week, a team of Brazilian scientists are reporting that they have not only observed the doves in the wild; they’ve found a population in an area the birds have never been proven to inhabit before.
No one knows very much about the blue-eyed ground dove. It has blue eyes (and blue spots) and it spends most of its time on the ground, as its name suggests. BirdLife International provides a fairly detailed physical description and….not much else. We’re not even sure what this bird sounds like. And let’s be clear: that’s pretty unusual. Bird enthusiasts and ornithologists meticulously document bird species, creating databases like the Internet Bird Collection, which provides photos, videos, and and audio recordings for the majority of birds existing today.
Of course, when the species population is somewhere between 50 and 249 individuals, it’s not so surprising that they’d be a little challenging to find. Until this week, only three populations of blue-eyed ground doves had been observed in the vast Cerrado region of Brazil, where the birds are endemic. Of those three populations—located in the Brazilian states Mato Grasso and Mato Grasso do Sul two are considered possibly extinct. Historically, specimens had also been found in Goiás and for many years it was assumed that 75-year-old reports of sightings in Minas Gerais were erroneous; now, however, those historical reports appear to have been accurate.
Speaking with Brazilian newspaper Estadão, researchers from the Observatório de Aves at the Instituto Butantan and SAVE Brazil announced the rediscovery of the blue-eyed ground dove and explained how they stumbled upon the new population. In June 2015, ornithologist Rafael Bessa was undertaking an expedition in the Cerrado when he noted an unfamiliar bird call. The next day, Bessa told Estadão (per Google Translate):
I returned to the place and I could recreate this vocalization with my microphone. I reproduced the sound and the bird landed on a flowering bush, coming towards me. I photographed the animal, and when I looked at the picture carefully, I saw that I had recorded something unusual. My legs started shaking.
More:
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/an-incredibly-rare-bird-has-been-rediscovered-in-brazil
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