Researchers recently spotted the brightly colored Ghana cuckooshrike in Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï National Park. The “lost” bird hadn’t been seen in 13 years, reports Mongabay’s John Cannon.
Stephanie Bartlett, a field research fellow with the International Bird Conservation Partnership (IBCP), took a photo of the cuckooshrike while Paulo Ditzel, also an IBCP research fellow, called out its movements to her. Bartlett told Mongabay she got the identifying photo of the bird first before she even saw it.
“They’re scared of you,” Bartlett said. “You don’t get to get close to them, and so often you have to use the camera as a tool for identification.” Her photo revealed a small bird with an orange body and black and yellow wings.
The photograph was the culmination of months of fieldwork and bird surveys supported by an instrumental team of West African researchers. “To say they were vital for this project is an understatement,” Ditzel said.
The Ghana cuckooshrike (Lobotos lobatus) was last documented in 2013 in Ghana’s Atewa Forest. Ornithologists believe it’s range stretches across sections of West Africa, from Guinea to Ghana, within the Upper Guinean Rainforest. However, the bird’s likely habitat has been whittled away by logging and agriculture, leaving isolated patches of forest across its range.
Ditzel and his colleagues noted that the cuckooshrike was listed by the Search for Lost Birds (SLB), a platform that documents bird species that haven’t been scientifically documented in more than a decade. The researchers had a feeling the bird might still be around in Taï.
With no verified sightings in 13 years, researchers had little information about the bird’s population or conservation status. They could have been extinct, extremely rare or just difficult to spot in the forest canopy.
“You can’t really make an effective conservation plan for a species that nobody’s seen in 10 years,” John Mittermeier with the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) and director of SLB said. “You’re not sure how it’s doing. You’re not sure where it is.”
Finding the Ghana cuckooshrike in Taï National Park underscores the importance of protecting a biodiversity hotspot that is also threatened by artisanal gold mining and illegal hunting, researchers say.
“Taï is a treasure for biodiversity conservation in Côte d’Ivoire and indeed throughout West Africa,” said Saint Guillaume Odoukpe, an ornithologist and assistant professor at Côte d’Ivoire’s Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny who organized and accompanied the IBCP expedition in the country. “I think there is plenty more to discover in this forest.”
That’s a sentiment shared by Mittermeier. “We have this sense sometimes [that] there’s nothing left to explore. But actually, there’s so many things left to explore, and in a way, these lost birds are a call to exploration,” he told Mongabay.
Banner image: A Ghana cuckooshrike in Côte d’Ivoire. Image by Stephanie Bartlett.
