American researchers find Indian `mystery bird' unseen for 113 years
Story-Date: 07:47 a.m. PST Wednesday, December 31, 1997

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American researchers find Indian `mystery bird' unseen for 113 years


By Paul Recer
AP Science Writer


WASHINGTON (AP) -- A small, elusive Indian owl that was considered
likely to be extinct because its last confirmed sighting was 113 years ago
has been photographed by American researchers who began looking for the
bird after uncovering a scientific scandal.

Pamela C. Rasmussen of the National Museum of Natural History in
Washington and two colleagues took still photos and video camera views
of the Indian Forest Owlet in a wooded area near Shahada, India,
northeast of Bombay.

"The last definite report on this bird was when a specimen was collected in
1884," said Rasmussen. "I didn't really expect to find it. This is a
once-in-a-lifetime thing."

The Forest Owlet, or Blewitt's Owl, is an 8-inch-high bird with big eyes
and outsized beak, feet and talons. It is brown with distinctive bands on
its wings and underside. And it is one of the puzzles of the bird world.

"It is considered one of the mystery birds of India," said Rasmussen.
She said the first recorded sighting of the owl was in the 1870s, and, over
the next 12 years, there were seven specimens collected and stuffed. After
that, no positive sightings had been recorded for 113 years.

"There were four reports this century, but we found that each of these
reports were erroneous or unconfirmed, said Rasmussen.

One of the reports was downright phony, the Americans found.

A British bird collector, Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, claimed to have
collected and stuffed a specimen in 1914. But after close analysis of the
specimen, Rasmussen concluded that Meinertzhagen had made a false claim.

"He claimed to have collected it in one locality in 1914 when, in fact, it
had been stolen from the British museum," she said. The specimen was
restuffed and archived with the false claims by Meinertzhagen. A close
study, however, showed that the bird was actually collected in the 1880s by
a bird scientist who used a unique method of preserving specimens.

The claim by Meinertzhagen, who died in the 1960s, was clearly a fraud,
said Rasmussen.

Intrigued by the owlet, Rasmussen, Asian bird expert Ben King of the
American Museum of Natural History in New York, and David Abbott, an
Ashburne, Va., bird watcher, went to India to look for the elusive
bird. After days of failure at one location, they spotted two of the small
owls in the forests near Shahada.

Rasmussen said the birds, observed on two different days in November, may
be a breeding pair. If they were of the same gender, she said, they would
not tolerate each other in the same hunting area. One bird was seen with
blood on its sharply-curved beak, indicating that it had recently fed on a
mammal or bird that it had to tear apart. This suggests that the small
owlet feeds on prey not much smaller than itself -- but that's just a
guess, said the scientists.

So little is known about the owlet, said Rasmussen, that it has been
considered one of the three "mystery birds" of India.

"There are two remaining mystery birds of India," she said. "The
pink-headed duck (last recorded in the 1930s) and the Himalayan Mountain
quail (last recorded about 100 years ago). There is no definite evidence
that they survive."

The Forest Owlet, too, was considered possibly gone forever, said
Rasmussen, "but we now know that it does survive."



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