Black-browed Babbler emerges after 170 years

JAKARTA: A bird last seen more than 170 years ago in the rainforests of Borneo has been rediscovered, amazing conservationists who have long assumed it was extinct. The Black-browed Babbler has only ever been documented once — when it was first described by scientists around 1848 — eluding all subsequent efforts to find it. But late last year, two men in Indonesian Borneo saw a bird they didn’t recognise and snapped photos of it before releasing the palm-sized creature back into the forest, according to Global Wildlife Conservation. Ornithologists were astounded to find that the Black-browed Babbler was alive and well, despite not having been seen since before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. “It was a bit like a ‘Eureka!’ moment,” said Panji Gusti Akbar, lead author of a paper on the discovery published on Thursday in the journal BirdingASIA. — AFP