Damar Flycatcher reappears after 103 years

Damar Flycatcher reappears after 103 years

Birdlife International-IP, Bogor, West Java,

In the Banda Sea, in the Southwest Maluku Province -- 400
kilometers south of Ambon and 1800 kilometers east of Jakarta,
the tiny 198 square kilometers Damar island harbors Damar
Flycatcher, one of Indonesia's 381 endemic birds.

The Damar Flycatcher Ficedula henrici is found nowhere else in
the world -- another example of Indonesia's remarkable
megadiversity. It was first discovered and collected in 1898 by
Heinrich Kuhn, a museum specimen collector, but had not been seen
since.

The Damar Flycatcher is a small 12-cm dark blue flycatcher
with a white-eyebrow and small white chest patch. The species
name honors Heinrich.

At that time, for three months, Heinrich and his team of
Javanese assistants collected bird specimens for the British
Museum, their job to characterize the bird species composition of
some of the most remote islands of Indonesia. In particular, they
sought new species previously unknown to science.

Only 49 species were collected, perhaps as avifaunal richness
is tightly linked with island size, enough for such a small
island. Nine flycatcher specimens were collected in 1898,
presumably from forest, because the island at this time was
described as "almost entirely covered in dense forest".

Damar Island is small. It would be swallowed by urban sprawl
if hypothetically placed atop Jakarta city. Local people go about
their business -- growing coconuts, cloves and agricultural
crops, keeping chickens, pigs and goats -- more or less as they
have done for centuries.

The highly limited global range on an explosive volcanic
island, coupled with a total lack of information on the status of
the island's forests, lead BirdLife International to class this
species status as vulnerable in their recently published Asian
Red Data Book of Threatened Birds.

Following in the rather faded footsteps of Heinrich,
BirdLife International-Indonesia Programme and the PHKA undertook
a survey of the island to rediscover the Damar Flycatcher
in August and September 2001 to determine its population status
and the level of threat to habitats on the island.

After more than two weeks traveling from Java, Colin Trainor
of BirdLife International and Clemens Bulurdity, a Forest
Protection and Nature Conservation (PHKA) officer from Saumlaki
on the Tanimbar Islands rediscovered the Damar Flycatcher in
tropical semi-evergreen forest near the villages of Wulur, Kumur
and Batumerah -- roughly in the same localities as specimens
collected way back in 1898.

Clemens successfully captured two males and a female with mist
nets, using the skills he had developed during previous BirdLife
surveys on the Tanimbar Islands.

The Damar Flycatcher was photographed for the first time ever,
measured, then released.

Its preferred habitat is the rattan dominated forest
understorey where it searches for insects on tree trunks, from
leaf litter, rocks and shrubs. Occasionally it enters forest-
ringed vegetable garden plots where it searches for grubs on
chili bushes and bananas that are surrounded in primary forest.

With more than 70 percent of the island still covered in
forest and the relatively low threat to forest from agricultural
clearing and small-scale logging, the Damar Flycatcher is in no
immediate danger of becoming extinct.

Given its small size and rather weak and ordinary song, it is
of little interest to the local people either as a food item or
as a tradable commodity. Some old men know it as Lwoto Lwoto, but
the younger men class it as just another small forest bird,
little different from a Fantail (Rhipidura sp).

The survey also added 13 more birds to Damar's short list,
with one the barred-necked cuckoo-dove Macropygia magna, being a
globally restricted-range species (a high total of 15 such
species known from the island).

The first updated information from Damar (in 103 years) on
other interesting species such as the blue-streaked Lory Eos
reticulata, olive-headed Lorikeet Trichoglossus euteles,
cinnamon-banded Kingfisher Halcyon australasia and dark-backed
bronze-cuckoo Chrysococcyx rufomerus was also collected during
systematic transect surveys.