A Bird Species Once Declared Extinct Was Just Photographed Alive in the Forests of Borneo

A small brown bird landed close to two local men named Muhammad Suranto and Muhammad Rizky Fauzan in October 2020 while they were moving through the trees gathering forest products in the South Kalimantan rainforest in the Indonesian part of Borneo, where visibility beyond a few meters is a generous estimate due to the dense undergrowth and high humidity. It had chocolate-colored feathers, a sturdy bill, and a characteristic black stripe across its face. They had no idea what it was. It was unlike anything they had ever seen. After carefully catching it and taking pictures, they let it go and left for home.

They assumed it was just another bird. For 172 years, the scientific community believed that what they had captured on camera had vanished. Since a German naturalist named Carl Schwaner collected a single specimen during explorations of the East Indies in the 1840s, no researcher, birder, or scientific expedition had documented the black-browed babbler, Malacocincla perspicillata. That specimen, a stuffed bird with yellow glass eyes added during the taxidermy process, was eventually displayed as the only tangible evidence of the species’ existence at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands. Not a single living bird. No reliable field sighting. No pictures. 172 years of silence and just one specimen.

It took a network that didn’t exist a generation ago to go from Suranto and Fauzan’s photos to confirmation. The men forwarded the photos to BW Galeatus, a local birdwatching organization. After looking through his bird guidebook, a member by the name of Joko Said Trisiyanto compared the pictures to the black-browed babbler, which is listed as possibly extinct, and marked them for ornithologist Panji Gusti Akbar. The photos were sent to specialists throughout the area by Akbar, a prominent member of the Indonesian bird conservation organization Birdpacker. During a COVID-19 pandemic that had grounded the majority of field researchers, the entire process took place online. The photographs depicted a living black-browed babbler, the longest-lost bird species in Asia, sitting on a branch in South Kalimantan and appearing completely unfazed. After the initial shock subsided, everyone agreed.

An issue that had plagued Indonesian ornithology for more than a century was resolved by the discovery. According to the records, Schwaner found his specimen in Java when he collected it. Schwaner’s lack of recorded time spent on Java during that time was the issue. This was noted in 1895 by a Swiss ornithologist by the name of Johann Čttikofer, who suggested that the bird had most likely been collected in Borneo. However, the uncertainty remained, adding mystery to mystery. It is now certain that the black-browed babbler is a Bornean species, specifically from the southeast of the island, thanks to the new photos and the precise location where Suranto and Fauzan made their discovery. Akbar said: “This sensational finding confirms that the Black-browed Babbler comes from south-eastern Borneo, ending the century-long confusion about its origins.”

Additionally, something that the taxidermied specimen was unable to convey was revealed by the live photos. The plush bird at the museum in the Netherlands has comparatively light-colored legs and a bill, along with yellow glass eyes. The bird in the pictures has a darker bill, deeper-colored legs, and a striking maroon iris. These variations are precisely what occurs when a bird is preserved; they are not anomalies. In taxidermy, the pigments used in eyes, legs, and bills are infamously unstable; glass eyes are used as replacements, and the colors used are not precise records but rather estimates or conventions. For 172 years, ornithologists using that one specimen had a technically flawed visual reference for the true appearance of the species. It’s possible that when some researchers saw a live black-browed babbler in Borneo’s forests in the past, they were unable to identify it because the actual bird did not resemble the one image that science had on file.

The calibration that puts the discovery in perspective was provided by Ding Li Yong of BirdLife International: the passenger pigeon was still among the most common birds on Earth when the black-browed babbler was last seen, and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had not yet been written. These two animals are now permanently gone. The absence of the black-browed babbler from science is longer than the extinction of the passenger pigeon. Nevertheless, it seems to have survived, silently occupying its portion of Borneo’s dwindling rainforest while the world above the canopy underwent nearly complete transformation.

The survival poses difficult-to-answer questions. In lowland Borneo, which has lost large tracts of primary forest due to logging, palm oil production, and land conversion over the past few decades, the species has survived despite massive deforestation. It is, in a sense, amazing that it has endured this long. It is undeniable that the same forces that altered its habitat continue to put pressure on it. Although fieldwork to determine population size and behavior is planned by Indonesian ornithologists, preliminary assessments indicate that habitat loss and potential poaching pose a serious threat. In other words, the discovery is both genuinely amazing and genuinely dangerous.

When Rizky Fauzan realized the full significance of what he and his friend had discovered, he said, “We didn’t expect it to be that special at all — we thought it was just another bird that we simply have never seen before.” This statement is particularly noteworthy. Something about the real process of discovery is captured in that sentence. For generations, the experts had been looking, speculating, and cataloging. Two men who were merely observing their surroundings saw the bird.