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.