Episode 486: Two Rediscovered Birds

Further reading: https://www.audubon.org/news/like-finding-unicorn-researchers-rediscover-black-naped-pheasant-pigeon-bird https://www.sci.news/paleontology/confuciusornis-shifan-11528.html The black-naped pheasant-pigeon: Confuciusornis: Show transcript: We’re going to learn about two birds that have been in the news lately. The first is the black-naped pheasant-pigeon. The word nape refers to the back of the neck, and this bird does have a black neck. It’s a dark blue-black all over, in fact, with reddish-brown wings, a red bill, red eyes, and long yellow legs. It looks almost identical to the other three species of pheasant-pigeons known, although some scientists think they’re subspecies. Those three are the white-naped, the green-naped, and the grey-naped pheasant-pigeons, and if you’re wondering if the spot of color on the back of the neck is the easiest way to tell these birds apart, you are exactly right. All four species are native to parts of New Guinea or small islands nearby. Pheasant-pigeons look a lot like pheasants and are about the size of a chicken, although they’re actually pigeons. They live in forests and eat seeds and fruit, and while they can fly they spend almost all of the time on the ground. We don’t know a whole lot about them because they’re so secretive and hard to spot in the wild, although the white-naped and green-naped birds are sometimes kept in zoos. In the case of the black-naped pheasant-pigeon, all scientists knew about it was from two specimens collected in 1882. It hadn’t been seen since…until September of 2022. A team of scientists visited Fergusson Island off the east coast of Papua New Guinea in September, as part of a worldwide collaboration of scientists called The Search for Lost Birds. This is similar to the Search for Lost Frogs that has been active for over a decade, discovering lots of new amphibians and rediscovering even more. The 2022 search was actually a follow-up to a 2019 expedition that had failed to find the bird, although it did make other discoveries. In 2022, the team brought more people and equipment, determined to make the best effort possible to find the black-naped pheasant-pigeon. They consulted with local hunters to find the best places to search, and talked to lots of residents to see if anyone had seen one, and spent day after day hiking through forested mountains. For weeks they had no luck. Then, in a remote mountain