Birders in Chad Just Found a Bird Lost to Science for 100 Years

Imagine spending a decade surveying a game reserve, hoping to spot some wintering migratory birds. Pretty standard stuff for an ornithologist. Now imagine, on one sunny February morning, you stumble upon a bird that hasn't been officially seen in nearly a century. That's exactly what happened in Chad, and frankly, it sounds like the plot of a very charming, very dusty adventure movie.

French ornithologists Pierre Defos du Rau and Julien Birard, alongside Chadian wildlife experts Idriss Dapsia and Abakar Saleh Wachoum, were out in the Abou Telfane Game Reserve. They'd been diligently documenting the region's avian life since 2016. The stakes for these birds are, it turns out, quite high. Their wetland habitats are shrinking faster than a wool sweater in a hot wash cycle, thanks to expanding cities, farms, and climate change-fueled droughts. Some even face the added peril of being hunted in conflict zones. It’s not exactly a cushy life.

Their specific mission that day involved a long-shot search for the Kordofan rufous sparrow, a bird typically found a good distance away in southwestern Sudan. Because apparently, just finding any bird in a rapidly changing ecosystem isn't quite challenging enough. But sometimes, when you aim for one improbable thing, the universe delivers an even more improbable one.