© BirdingASIA
Black-browed babbler
A team of researchers from Indonesia and Singapore has found evidence of the continued existence of a bird long thought extinct. In their paper published in the journal
BirdingASIA, the team describes the history of the bird, why it was thought to be extinct and how it was found in Borneo.
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sometime between 1843 and 1848 a bird now called the black-browed babbler was captured by naturalist Carl A.L.M. Schwaner. Records of the find are sketchy, but
it appeared the bird had been captured on the island of Java. That finding was the one and only piece of evidence of the bird's existence — it is currently labeled as "data deficient" in ornithology texts. The bird was put into storage, and for the next 170 years, there were no further reports of its existence. Over time, the bird and its history became known as "the biggest enigma in Indonesian ornithology." Most in the field assumed it had gone extinct. Then, last year, a pair of researchers, Muhammad Rizky Fauzan and Muhammad Suranto captured a bird that they could not identify on the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo. They took pictures of it and sent them to colleagues, then released the bird.
Comment: We're seeing more and more of these videos from around the world in recent years. Is that just down to people having mobile phones with in-built cameras, or are mosquito populations increasing?