New Bird Species Found in Central Peru

A graduate student from Kansas University has found a new bird species in central Peru.

Peter Hosner, a graduate from the Kansas University and a team has published a study describing a new bird species called Junin Tapaculo. The bird was found in the remote Andes Mountains of central Peru.

The tapaculos (ta-pa-COO-lo) are a group of birds found in South and Central America. Highest diversity of the group was found in the Andean region. These birds have short wings and long legs with string feet that they use to scratch the ground. They are brown or gray in color. The birds are mostly identified by their loud ventriloquial calls. When approached, they stick up their tails and scurry for cover.

"We found the Junin Tapaculo in the field by its distinctive voice," Hosner, a doctoral student of ecology and evolutionary biology at KU said in a news release. "I'd spent a lot of time traveling and working with birds in the Andes before I enrolled at KU, and I had never heard anything like it before. We made voice recordings and collected specimens that are needed in all scientific species descriptions. Tapaculos are extremely difficult to identify, so at this point we weren't sure if it was a new species, or if we just happened to record a rarely given vocalization by an already described species."

The Junin Tapaculo is a small, blackish bird that lifts its tail when confronted. Hosner and colleagues found that the bird lived at a band of specific elevation between 8,000 and 10,500 feet.

Other researchers have often described Tapaculos to be mouse-like in behavior as they are very difficult to spot.

"They're active and almost never stop moving. Even if you can't see the birds themselves, you can usually locate them by the movement of vegetation in their wake. They're most easily seen by playing recordings of their songs to coax them out into the open. Because of this behavior, frustrated observers have suggested that tapaculos behave more like mice than they do birds." Hosner said in a news release.

Hosner added that the Andean landscape changes dramatically with elevation and so does the bird species. They found six different species of tapaculos at different elevations in the Junin region.

The eastern slope of Andes is steep and densely forested. It gets colder and wetter with increasing altitude. Finding a new bird species from a group of birds renowned to frustrate ornithologists in this remote region is quite challenging. However, for first-time-author Hosner, nothing is more challenging than the paperwork associated with research.

 "It's endless," he said.  

The study is published in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology.