#eurylaimides

‘Rediscovered’ after 100 years, Gurney’s pitta is in peril once again

The tiny, vibrantly colored bird, first described from the Tanintharyi region of Myanmar in 1875, was thought to have gone extinct when it wasn’t recorded by scientists for more than a century. But in 1986, researchers found a population of Gurney’s pitta (Hydrornis gurneyi) in Thailand. Then in 2003, the IUCN downlisted the bird from critically endangered to endangered after a preliminary survey estimated the population in Myanmar was at least double the 11 pairs previously assumed. For a while, things looked hopeful for the pitta.

Today, however, the Thai population of Gurney’s pitta is all but wiped out, researchers say. And the Myanmar population is also in trouble, thanks to deforestation clearing one of the bird’s last remaining habitats, a new study has found.

Named after the British politician and amateur ornithologist John Henry Gurney in 1843, the pitta is locally known as the black-belly bird in Thai (นกแต้วแร้วท้องดำ). In addition to its distinctive black stomach, the attractive male pitta has lemon-yellow sides and a crown of bright blue plumage — features that earned it the title of the “most wanted bird in Thailand” in 2008 from birdwatchers.

The pitta’s bright plumage has also made it a victim of the international pet trade. Prior to the 1980s, when the scientific community thought the species was extinct, animal dealers reported to scientists that up to 50 pittas were being sold annually into the pet trade. The researchers used this information to find the Thai population in 1986.

“Hunting and poaching remains a significant problem,” Anuj Jain, the Asia coordinator for extinction prevention at the U.K.-based BirdLife International, who was not involved in the new study, told Mongabay in an email. “Local villagers hunt for subsistence but armed Thai poachers enter the area to poach indiscriminately.”

Gurney’s pitta is typically not a poacher’s main target, Jain added, but since it’s a ground-dwelling bird feeding mostly on earthworms, it can get trapped in ground nets intended for other species like pangolins.

But poaching isn’t the only threat to the pitta’s existence. Deforestation, particularly to make way for oil palm plantations, has been wiping out the bird’s habitat. In the Tanintharyi region of Myanmar, at least 10 percent of the total land area has been set aside for oil palm cultivation.

In the latest study, researchers found that in 1999, when oil palm expansion into the region began, there was around 3,225 square kilometers (1,245 square miles) of potential habitat for the pitta in south Tanintharyi, an area the size of Yosemite National Park. By 2017, there was only 656 km2 (253 mi2) of suitable forest habitat left — a decrease of 80%.

An Old World bird in a New World rainforest

The Sapayoa, a rainforest bird from Central and South America, is an evolutionary enigma—genetic analysis shows that its closest relatives are bird species living across the ocean in Asia and Africa. Now, new research in The Auk: Ornithological Advances demonstrates for the first time that its natural history links it to its evolutionary relatives thousands of miles away.

How the Sapayoa ended up so far from other members of its lineage remains a mystery, and little is known about its reproductive biology or social behavior. However, new field work in Panama by Sarah Dzielski and Benjamin Van Doren of Cornell University and their colleagues reveals that Sapayoas consistently build nests that hang over the water along ravine-bottom streams. One of the active nests they observed was attended by a family group comprised of an adult male and female and two immature males, all four of which brought food to the two chicks. The researchers were surprised by the social behavior they observed, which included mounting between individuals of the same sex, possibly to establish dominance and maintain social cohesion.

These are the first extended observations of Sapayoa breeding behavior, and they provide hints at how this unusual bird is connected with its roots. Many of the Sapayoa's Old World relatives are cooperative breeders, getting help from family groups, and the pear-shaped hanging nest also is consistent with Old World "suboscines," the group of birds to which Sapayoas belong.

Dzielski, Van Doren, and their colleagues Jack Hruska and Justin Hite searched for Sapayoa nests as part of an expedition to Panama's Darién National Park in summer 2014, observing the family group at their focal nest for more than 70 hours over ten days. "Nest searching was always an adventure," says Dzielski. "We found countless abandoned nests, and while checking inside for eggs or evidence that the nest was active, we found all sorts of surprises. In a few instances, a large grasshopper the size of a mouse hopped out from under the flap and scared the daylights out of us!"