Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
It all started in April 2017, when Francisco Sornoza-Molina, an ecologist at the National Institute for Biodiversity in Quito, Ecuador, was wandering the alpine plateaus (called “paramos”) of Cerro de Arcos, a rock formation in the country’s southwestern region.
He was on the lookout for hummingbirds.The paramos are belts between forest and snow line, where the landscape is cold and nearly treeless. Wind whips across tufts of tussock grasses and clusters of cushion plants, flat as emerald mats. Rabbits and foxes roam among the flowering shrubs, and rodents do their best to dodge caracaras—birds of prey with an appetite for all things small and furry. Despite the wind and low temperature, there are a lot of hummingbirds in this part of the Andes, too.
Sornoza-Molina spotted a bird, except it didn’t look quite like he thought it would. He snapped a photo, thinking it was probably an immature hillstar hummingbird, but male hillstars have brilliant violet or green plumage spangling their throats, while this one wore a deep, royal blue. Sornoza-Molina left, but soon trekked back to stands of Chuquiraga jussieui to get a closer look (hummingbirds often drop by to enjoy nectar from the orange and yellow flowers). Researchers then headed to areas nearby to collect sound recordings, install a camera to capture behavioral data, and eventually nab some specimens.
Genetic testing and vocal analysis confirmed what Sornoza-Molina had begun to suspect. He had a new species on his hands. He and a group of collaborators dubbed the bird Oreotrochilus cyanolaemus, or the blue-throated hillstar. But just as soon as they’d identified it, they realized the bird’s days might be numbered.
Researchers only spotted individuals in five places. When they modeled the species’ possible range, even the most optimistic estimate spanned barely 62 square miles. As they describe in a new paper in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, the grass and bush habitats the bird seems to prefer are increasingly grazed by livestock, transformed into cropland, eaten up by fire, or reserved for gold mining. The authors estimate that the species probably numbers no more than 750 individuals, and maybe as few as 250.
“It’s very scary,” says Elisa Bonaccorso, a study coauthor and ecologist at the University of San Francisco, in Quito. “My fear is that, anything that’s new that’s there, we’re going to lose it before we describe it.” In certain circumstances, she says, conservationists could band together, raise money, and buy up land to save the habitat. But that’s not an option here, she says, where the land is “so valuable for mining that owners wouldn’t sell.” So the researchers found themselves with a conservation…
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