 Luis Mazariegos
Colombia's Critically Endangered Chestnut-bellied Hummingbird
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New sightings and species roundup
24-03-2006
The Chestnut-bellied Hummingbird Amazilia castaneiventris, a Critically Endangered species with a tiny restricted range of around 6 km2, has been studied in Boyacá, Colombia, where it was last reported in 2000 after a gap of 22 years.
Bee-keeping by local people in the area has encouraged the planting of flowering bushes, to the birds’ benefit. The closely related Rufous-tailed Hummingbird A. tzacatl has dingy-grey rather than rufous lower underparts. (Ornitología Colombiana No. 2 (2004): 47–49)
In Brazil, a taxonomic revision of the Mouse-coloured Tapaculo Scytalopus speluncae complex has identified one new species and suggested more are waiting to be described. The research, published by Giovanni Nachtigall Maurício in the Brazilian journal Ararajuba (13: 7–28) finds that birds from three areas of southern Brazil and Misiones in Argentina differ from the rest of the complex and should be considered a separate species, for which the name Planalto Tapaculo S. pachecoi is proposed.
Finally, an expedition to in the remote northern tip of Myanmar close to the border with Yunnan, China, has discovered a new species of scimitar-babbler. On 6 February 2004, expedition members captured two scimitar-babblers on a steep hillside in temperate rainforest close to the village of Naung Mung. A third bird was captured two days later at another site close by, and all three proved to be females.
The combination of long decurved bill, long legs, large feet and short tail all pointed to the birds belonging to the genus Jabouilleia. However, only one species in that genus was then known, the Short-tailed Scimitar-babbler J. danjoui from Vietnam and adjacent parts of Laos, some 600 km to the south-east. Subsequently, close comparison of the birds from Myanmar with museum specimens of Short-tailed Scimitar-babbler have confirmed them as a new species, which is described in The Auk (122: 1064–1069), and which the authors have named the Naung Mung Scimitar-babbler Jabouilleia naungmungensis.