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Not that I don’t enjoy seeing new species myself, it’s just that they are an easy target and I am nothing if not lazy and mean spirited. But there is one kind of tick that I genuinely do enjoy, and as I do more and more birding it becomes harder and harder to get; new families.
Unlike many endemic species they aren’t remotely rare, and can be seen just about anywhere in the country, and they are also amazingly confiding, allowing close approaches and even coming close to us of their own volition. The family also reaches into India and as far east as samoa and Fiji.
One of the less well remembered awful things that happened in the Second World War (a six year period of history filled with an uncountable number of awful things) is that war’s direct role in the extinction of two species of rail. The loss of these two species was, in fact, no aberration, except in how late the extinctions were.
Not, as Linneaus thought, an ostrich, nor even, as later scientists concluded, a distant cousin of pigeons deserving of family rank, it was an honest-to-goodness pigeon, deeply embedded within the family Columbidae. One species alive today offers a glimpse of such behavior: the Nicobar Pigeon ( Caloenas nicobarica ). .’s
How many species there were is probably lost to history, but there were certainly many hundreds. Sadly, as I’ve explained before , most of these species became extinct as humans arrived on the islands, and with it one of the most astonishing radiations of birds imaginable. But here’s the thing. It didn’t used to be.
I’ve subsequently managed to dive in some spectacular destinations, including Turneffe Atoll in Belize, the Great Astrolabe Reef in Fiji, the kelp forests of Monterey and the wreck of the President Coolidge in Vanuatu. In fact no less a figure than Jacques Cousteau rated it in his top ten, and he was no slouch when it came to diving!
Enter the Silktail , an odd little bird found only on two islands, Taveuni and Vanua Levu, in Fiji. The Silktail, ( Lamprolia victoriae ) by Tom Tarrant (CC) A 2008 paper on the phylogeny of the species and several others came to a surprising conclusion, that the species was actually related to the fantails.
It is, instead, a member of the Petroicidae, the Australasian robins, a family mostly found in New Guinea and Australia but also reaching here in New Zealand and as far across the Pacific as Fiji. Until I started researching this post I didn’t know an interesting fact about the range of this species.
There were two species there, even, of a type I had never heard of. Pardalotes are actually their own family, and a family entirely endemic to Australia. Insofar as they relate to other bird families, they are perhaps closest to the thornbills, another family that is mostly Australian but reaches as far as Thailand and Fiji.
It’s a species that I was able to see and photograph while visiting Australia last Christmas, or at least it would have been, had it ever existed. It is one of the many species that went extinct in New Zealand, only for once it didn’t. But it seems the story wasn’t so clear cut. And, sometimes, New Zealand.
A combination of extinctions and proximity to Fiji means that a trip to that island group would net you pretty much all the same birds plus a whole raft of others. According to the guides it is a forest bird in Fiji (and an elusive one, I never saw one in my week there in 2005) but in Tonga I saw it in the towns and country gardens.
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