I mean, what do you have to go through to actually investigate one of these potentially lost birds?

Yeah, I can give you a great example of that from a couple of years ago, actually.

So in September of 2022, we did a project on a bird called the black-naped pheasant pigeon.

And if you Google that bird, you can see the video of the reaction of one of the team members when we eventually found the bird.

And it's a great video.

It really captures the excitement of the moment and gives a sense of just how... enthusiastic and surprised we were when we finally found this bird but the way we went about it so this was a it's a large terrestrial pigeon known from a single island off the coast of papua new guinea it hadn't been documented since the late 1800s so and the exact location was not exactly clear where it was on this island so we knew it was from this island we knew it'd been more than a century since anybody had definitely documented it And our strategy was essentially we put together a team, which included some scientists from the US, as well as some partners from the National Museum in Papua New Guinea, and some conservationists based in the province, as well as some people from the island itself.

So we had a team of about seven or eight people travel to this island.

Now tell us, what can your average citizen do to help search for lost birds?

Can you share a little about how you and Lily came to be connected and give us some more insight into why this bird was so wanted?

So Lily is an absolute inspiration when it comes to both wildlife conservation in general and in particular lost birds.

So you mentioned the Dusky Titraca there, which he and his team at the Peregrine Fund rediscovered in 2023.

And he has also been at the forefront of rediscovering a number of other lost birds in Madagascar, including a species called the Madagascar poachard.

critically endangered duck that was widely believed to be extinct the madagascar

serpent eagle which is

probably one of the hardest to find raptors in the world and the Madagascar red owl.

So how is American Bird Conservancy and your other partners investing in the growth of this program? How can people get involved and join the search for these lost birds?

[laughs]

... people have been looking, looking at this island and these highlands and being like, "Oh my gosh, I really wanna get up there," uh, myself included.

Um, James Eaton, who is the...

He's a head of Birdtour Asia, uh, a company that works on birding tours around that region, and the author of Birds of Indonesia, so he's done a lot of birding work, um, around that area.

He'd also been looking at this island and was really interested to get up there.

Um, so as soon as we happened to hear about this mountaineering group and this opportunity to reach these highlands, we were like, "We have to find a way to join them-

[laughs]

... and do this." And the lost birds connection to it is really interesting.