First known photos of 'lost bird' captured by scientists | Hacker News Reader

First known photos of 'lost bird' captured by scientists

phys.org

111 pointswglb41 comments

Anything with a name like "Red-bellied Squeaker Frog" begs for a video clip.

Not a video; but, a couple of pics: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article2...

Did they capture the bird to study it? Or they just made a photo?

There is not a whole lot you can do by capturing a bird and observing it in captivity. My understanding is that the majority of the scientific insight ornithologists are interested in getting from a species like this comes from observing it in the wild, banding it, and/or taking DNA samples.

"photoS"

Anyone know where to find them?

I’ll be honest, a picture of the bird being held by a scientist was not what I expected to see.

They don't mention it in the article, but the birds were likely captured using mist nets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mist_net). It is a standard technique:

In total, about 18 birds were found at three sites during the expedition.

I know nets are cheap, but, why don't use cameras instead?

The nets are much more successful in capturing all sorts of birds at once, with little effort, even in environments where you wouldn't get clear line of sight for photos and/or for species that don't sit still for long enough.

Handling the birds makes for far better identification (and more detailed pictures too), which is important for places where unknown, hard to identify or hard to detect species are likely to exist. It also allows taking measurements, banding the birds and even collecting tissue samples. So nets are a far better ROI for some scientific projects.

Thanks, I was wondering how they got a bird to sit still on a hand for a photo. Not exactly common behavior for flappies.

thanks, makes sense then

Ornithologists always use mist nets to survey birds. They are very widely used and rarely harm the birds when used by people who've learned how to use them. Their possession is controlled in the sorts of countries with legal systems that specify first world stuff like that.

That’s what I’d expect to see if they’d just used an AI to generate the photo though.

I had the same impression. Some of the crest points of this bird seem to mutate into background leaves in a part of the photo. The eye lies in a strange place also. That photo is strange.

... But I can be wrong and is really easy to prove it.

If they really have captured the bird, they should have taken some genetic material in the process. Entangled birds lose feathers all the time.

I guess we have to be a little suspicious these days about image provenance but yall sound paranoid. A couple of famous ornithologists are going to take a 6-week expedition and then trash their careers by using DALL-E? If the grip looks weird to you, look at "The Mist Netter’s Bird Safety Handbook".

>> The leg hold, or photographer's grip (below), is used to hold birds while photographing them since it maximizes the amount of plumage in view; to transfer them from one bander's hand to another; or to examine features. For this hold, you "scissor" grip the bird's tibia between the fore and middle fingers (or between the ring and middle fingers if your hand is very small) and then clamp the bird's tarsometatarsi between your thumb and fore (or middle) finger. In this hold, the bird is securely gripped above and below the metatarsal joint, which is bent into an "L" shape. The bird will be able to flap its wings and rock backwards and forwards, but it should not be able to rock from side to side. Never hold a bird by the ends of its legs alone — they will break! Place your free hand over the bird's back to keep its wings from flapping until the photographer is ready to shoot.

https://www.birdpop.org/docs/pubs/Smith_et_al_1997_Mist_Nett... (page 25)

> If the grip looks weird to you

Nope, The grip is normal. You are replying to other post

At least it wasn't Darwin eating some species he just discovered

Not sure why this got down voted. Maybe slightly off-topic (but still this is a rather invasive method of study), but it is true.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/08/12/430075644/di...

Usually links to phys.org on this site are to physics articles so I expected the bird to be metaphorical, not literal.

[stub for offtopicness]

Lots of people tweeting about this.

He wasn't lost he was hiding!!

Note that these birds have been lost for only two decades. So this is not some ancient species being recovered.

also says that is "endemic" - if they haven't been seen for years, how do they know that? not a brilliant article, imho.

Endemic to X means that it's geographical distribution is confined to X. The (original) geographical distribution of basically all bird species is fairly well known, due to the efforts of 19th and 20th century scientists and their collection of museum specimens. The reference work here is the "Peters check list", completed over the course of several decades in the 20C by various ornithologists.

Of course, you have to check when they say "species" whether they're referring to a subspecies "elevated to species status" by dodgy "phylogeography" genetics studies.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_L._Peters

Also note that this is likely not a good sign like "Oh, they're not extinct after all!". You may well have found their last survivor and that's it.

The article says they found 18 at 3 different sites, in a region of Congo that had been dangerous for the public to visit but had recently become safer. That does not prove a healthy population but it seems a step up from “last survivor”

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