In 2022, an ornithologist high in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in northern Colombia spotted the emerald green and cobalt blue shimmering plumage of the Santa Marta sword-winged bird, a large hummingbird that had only been documented twice since 1879. Ornithologist Yurgen Vega captured the images as the bird sat on a branch.
Once lost to science, now found.
The bird was on the American Bird Conservancy’s 10 most wanted bird list, which is at the top of a list of “missing birds” officially defined as having not been documented by photo, sound or genetic evidence for at least a decade.
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One of the main goals of the list is to persuade birdwatchers and others to look for these birds when they are out in the field and to bring back evidence that the birds are not extinct.
People have been searching for lost birds for decades, but in 2020 the process was formalised as the Search for Lost Birds project by the conservation organisation in partnership with two other groups, Re:wild and BirdLife International.
Researchers from the groups published a paper in June that included a definitive list of birds that should be found. They combed through tens of millions of photos, videos, and audio recordings from birding databases such as iNaturalist and xeno-canto. The study concluded that there are 144 species of birds that have disappeared from the scientific world but may still exist.
“With greater visibility in global ornithological and birding networks, there is great potential to learn more about under-recognized and highly threatened birds,” said Cameron Rutt, lead author of the paper and until recently coordinating the project for the American Bird Conservancy.
Once the birds are documented, experts analyze how they can be preserved and studied. For example, since the rediscovery of the Santa Marta swordwing, researchers have been studying the bird’s habitat needs and biology, and recently published a paper on their findings.
They identified five small populations of the birds, about 50 individuals, in a small forested valley in a fork of the Guatapurí River in Colombia. Experts say the sword-wing population is a case of micro-endemism, a species that is very small and confined to a specific location. It is considered critically endangered.
Finding a species poses a new list of challenges. What’s the best way to protect it from storms, a changing climate or crowds? Esteban Botero-Delgadillo, conservation science director for SELVA, a Colombian conservation organization, said he and others worry that “if this news gets out, there will be a lot of birdwatchers and people.”
Because of this, “we’ve been very uncertain about its whereabouts for over a year,” he added. The bird is located on Indigenous land, which makes management more complicated.
Violence can be a threat to the habitats of some lost birds. In 1999, the rediscovery of a small flock of yellow-eared parrots, resembling green birds with yellow markings, in western Colombia led to the creation of a reserve. The population has grown to thousands.
In 2021, environmentalist Gonzalo Cardona, who helped restore the population to healthy numbers, was shot dead by an unidentified criminal gang and his body buried in a shallow grave. Botero-Delgadillo said his team also had to be careful in the field.
Another bird that recently made the top 10 list is the black-naped pheasant pigeon. The chicken-sized bird was found in a remote area of Papua New Guinea in 2022 after going undocumented for 126 years.
Even if a bird hasn’t been documented by science for a long time, that doesn’t mean it’s gone missing from the local population. To find the pheasant pigeon, Papua New Guinea’s most endangered land bird, researchers went to villages where the bird was last seen.
Among them was John C. Mittermeier, founder of the Missing Bird Search Project. “The people who live there are mostly subsistence farmers, fishermen and hunters, and so they really know the land and the wildlife,” he said. “We asked them if they had seen this species,” the local name is auwo.
One day, one of the birds was walking in front of a camera trap that had been set up.
“Seeing the first photos of the pheasant dove felt like finding a unicorn,” Mittermeier said. “It’s the kind of moment you dream of your whole life as a conservationist and bird watcher.”
Three species are considered extinct in North America. The best known is the ivory-billed woodpecker. The last universally accepted sighting in the United States was in Louisiana in 1944. It was seen again in Cuba in 1987. There have been no confirmed sightings since. Due to grainy videos of what may have been the bird, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has not declared the bird extinct.
Two other birds in North America are the Eskimo woodcock and the Bachman’s warbler.
It didn’t take long for some of the project’s 144 missing birds to be found; more than a dozen have already been found. The first came before the article was published: a mussau trill, a small bird with a long tail and long wings, photographed in Papua New Guinea in June by Joshua Bergmark, a tour guide with Ornis Birding Expeditions.
Mittermeier was ecstatic about the news, and even happier this week when the project announced that the unicolor cottonmouth had been documented in Bolivia.
“The enthusiasm shown by people around the world gives me hope for the potential to find more of these lost birds,” he said.
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