This report suggests the following observation was the first live
sighting ...
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=617565
After 60 years in hiding, wren-babbler is found
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
07 March 2005
For nearly 60 years it has been the world's least-known bird - until
now. The rusty-throated wren-babbler, a small stub-tailed ball of
feathers the size of a mouse, has been seen only once, when a specimen
was captured in the Mishmi Hills of north-east India in 1947.
But now two American ornithologists have found and photographed a new
example of Spelaeornis badeigularis - by playing its own call back to
it.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York disclosed at the
weekend that one of its research associates, Ben King, had located the
wren-babbler with a colleague, Julian Donahue, a retired curator at the
Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.
The men travelled deep into one of India's least-known states,
Arunachal Pradesh, in the eastern Himalayas close to the border with
Tibet, which even Indians need a permit to visit.
Having procured the necessary three permits as westerners, they took a
little-used road deep into the Mishmi Hills, which are 6,000ft high and
covered with broadleaved evergreen forest.
At the forest edge Mr King, who is among the world's foremost experts
on Asian birds, played a tape of the song of a close relative - the
rufous-throated wren babbler - of the bird they were seeking.
A bird with a similar call replied; Mr King recorded this, and played
it back. An even stronger response was elicited, and eventually, after
an hour of watching the leaves and twigs move, the rusty-throated bird
came into view. Subsequent photographs identified the bird beyond doubt.
"It was flying low along the ground and behind bushes and in the brush.
We could hear it. And we could see glimpses of it ... It took an hour
of chasing this very elusive, secretive bird before we could see enough
to convince ourselves," Mr Donahue said.
It was difficult to say, he added, if this was actually the world's
rarest bird, but as far as was known it was the bird that had been
least seen.
The only previous evidence of the species had been a dead bird found
about 30 miles away, during a 1947 expedition into the region led by
another American ornithologist, S. Dillon Ripley, who was later to head
the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.
"To see this thing alive in the wild is pretty monumental," Mr Donahue
said. "Although it doesn't impress most of my friends because they are
not bird watchers."
The wren-babbler is about 4 inches long and is distinguished by a
triangular rust-colored patch on its throat. Much of its plumage is a
chequerboard of brown and white. Its sole scientific distinction is its
rarity.
What the world's rarest bird may be is a matter of dispute. Until 2000
it was Spix's macaw, a beautiful blue parrot from north-eastern Brazil,
of which only one species survived in the wild; but in that year the
wild bird was found dead.
Some people think that tiny numbers of the ivory-billed woodpecker of
the United States, which has not been positively seen since 1944, may
still survive in the dense forests of Georgia and Louisiana.
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