New Paper in Journal of Lost Species
Back in 2024, Jason and I traveled to the eastern Whiteman Range in West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea, where we conducted ad-hoc bird surveys and scouted localities for future work. Among the surprises during that trip was a camera trap record of a single New Britain Thrush (Zoothera talaseae), then thought to be a “lost” species with no documented sightings since 1971. Correspondence with several other ornithologists working in Melanesia and assessment of their unpublished field notes revealed this was not quite the case: Richard Hazell and Bonny Koane had photographed a mist-netted individual as recently as 2017, while a 1999 expedition by University of Wisconsin and the PNG National Museum and Art Gallery had resulted in three specimens. We thus decided to conduct a systematic review of all known observations of the species, uncovering a mere 15 total (only 11 of which were accompanied by documentation).
This review—along with conservation implications and suggestions for effective survey methods—has now been published as an open-access paper in the excellent new Journal of Lost Species, run out of the University of Nevada Museum of Natural History. You can view the paper here, or download a formatted pdf. (Excitingly, it’s my first to have the abstract translated into Tok Pisin.)
