As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Saturday 21 March 2015

Hummingbird, thought extinct, rediscovered in Colombia

ByMICHAEL CASEYCBS NEWSMarch 20, 2015, 5:44 PM

Conservationists Carlos Julio Rojas and Christian Vasquez had gone into a Columbian mountain range looking to document fires burning in the fragile ecosystem.

A blue-bearded helmetcrest (Oxypogon cyanolaemus) caught on camera in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta National Park, Colombia. Image credit: Carlos Julio Rojas / ProAves.
Image credit: Carlos Julio Rojas / ProAves
They ended up rediscovering a hummingbird that had not been seen since 1946 and was believed to have gone extinct.

The duo earlier this month managed to snap the only known photographs of the blue-bearded helmetcrest.
As he hiked through the region's Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta National Park, Rojas said he "saw the flash of a bird screeching past me and saw it perch on a bush nearby."

"I managed to take a quick photo of it before it flew off. I then reviewed the photo on the camera screen and immediately recognized the strikingly patterned hummingbird as the long-lost blue-bearded helmetcrest," said Rojas, whose discovery was first reported in the journal ProAves. "I was ecstatic. After reports of searches by ornithologists failing to find this spectacular species, Christian and I were the first people alive to see it for real."

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