[va-richmond-general] interesting bird article

 
<http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-na-wren27feb27,0,2869727.story?c
oll=la-home-science>
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-na-wren27feb27,0,2869727.story?co
ll=la-home-science

THE NATION


Camera, and Song, Catch Rare Bird

By Robert Lee Hotz
Times Staff Writer

February 27, 2005

NEW YORK - Armed only with a song, two naturalists flushed what may be
the world's rarest bird from the steep slopes of the Himalayas, a
species never before seen alive in the wild.

The sighting of the secretive stub-tailed creature, known as the
rusty-throated wren-babbler or Spelaeornis badeigularis, was disclosed
Saturday by the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The
sighting was confirmed by photographs and videotape.

Benjamin F. King, a museum ornithologist, and Julian P. Donahue, a
retired curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, identified
the bird during a November expedition into the Mishmi Hills of
northeastern India at an altitude of about 8,000 feet. Westerners are
rarely allowed into this densely forested part of India.

They lured the wren-babbler into the open by playing a tape recording of
bird calls, Donahue said.

"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," Donahue said.

The only previous evidence of the species had been a dead bird found in
1947 during an expedition into the region led by S. Dillon Ripley, who
would later head the Smithsonian Institution.

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
checkerboard of brown and white. Its sole scientific distinction is its
rarity.

To "see this thing alive in the wild is pretty monumental," Donahue
said. "It doesn't impress most of my friends because they are not bird
watchers." 


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