Afghanistan: Almost Never-Seen Bird Resurfaces

A bird species with just a handful of documented human sightings in its past has resurfaced in remote Afghanistan, its apparent breeding site. The large-billed reed warbler, or Acrocephalus orinus, was discovered in 1867 but has turned up rarely since then. During the summer of 2008, U.S. ornithologist Robert J. Timmins was commissioned by the American aid group USAID to catalogue bird species in the Badakshan province in north-eastern Afghanistan. He recorded a mysterious birdcall and the recording found its way to Swedish ornithologist Lars Svensson who began to suspect the variety of bird. Svensson and Urban Olsson at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden had found in a previous study that about a dozen stuffed birds in museums around the world had been wrongly classified. They were not of the common species of reed warbler the curators had assumed, but rather the far rarer large-billed reed warbler seen on just three documented occasions since 1867. Olsson and colleagues had pinpointed the north-eastern Afghanistan as an area where the Large-billed Reed Warbler probably bred in the 1930s. In June 2009, the Afghan ornithologists Naqeebullah Mostafawi, Ali Madad Rajabi and Hafizullah Noori from the Wildlife Conservation Society Afghanistan managed to travel to the Badakshan region, despite the war and ongoing clan conflicts. They used nets to capture 15 individuals of the mysterious bird and sent photographs and feather samples to Svensson and Olsson, who used DNA to confirm that after 142 years, the breeding site of perhaps the world's least known bird had been found. News of the find was published in the journal Birding Asia and has aroused huge interest in ornithological circles.

Source: World Science, 25^th January 2010