A bird which was last seen more than 170 years ago in the rainforests of Indonesia’s Borneo has been rediscovered. It has amazed conservationists from across the world, who assumed that the bird was extinct.
The Black-browed Babbler has only been seen once, when it was first described by scientists around 1848, evading all subsequent efforts to find it. But, late last year, two men in Indonesia’s rainforest saw a bird they didn’t recognise and clicked few photos of it before releasing the creature back into the forest, according to Global Wildlife Conservation.
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Bird experts were shocked to find that the Black-browed Babbler was alive and well, despite not having been seen since Charles Darwin published “On the origin of Species”.
The bird has often been called as ‘the biggest enigma in Indonesian ornithology.’ “It mind-blowing to think that it’s not extinct and still living in these rainforests,” Panji Gusti Akbar said, who is a lead author in the journal BirdingASIA.
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The bird has been long missing than any other Asian bird, little features of the bird are known like it has brown and grey feathers, according to the paper. Researchers are hoping to go back to Borneo rainforest where it was recently spotted, but COVID-19 travel restrictions could slow the effort.
Ding Li Yong, a co-author on the paper and a Singapore-based conservationist said that, “There is now a critical window of opportunity for conservationists to secure these forests to protect the babbler and other species.”
More than 150 species of birds across the world are considered lost with no sightings in the past decade, experts say.
“Discoveries like this are incredible and give us so much hope that it’s possible to find other species that have been lost to science for decades or longer,” said Barney Long, Global Wildlife Conservation’s senior director of species conservation.
