By ABA Young Birder, Owen Robertson
Four years ago, I began to know the Alagoas Foliage-Gleaner. Four years ago, I learned it went extinct during my lifetime. Four years ago, I took refuge and grief from every picture, every video, every article that mentioned this greatest of tragedies. Now, I know a greater one.
Few subjects in ornithology are as deceptively complex as the simple number of bird species that exist. Estimates range from eight to eighteen thousand, and sometimes higher. Revolutionizing this field is a new understanding of a phenomenon called “cryptic speciation,” wherein allopatric (geographically distinct) populations of a species diverge genetically, behaviorally, and vocally from each other, but continue to look the same. As a result, there are no less than six bird species whose names now use the delightful and interest-piquing moniker of “cryptic”, from the Cryptic Becard to the Cryptic Forest-Falcon.
But one is unique.
The Cryptic Treehunter went extinct in 2007, four months before I was born. It was endemic to humid hill forests in northeastern Brazil. Nothing is known of its juvenile plumage, its movements, its diet, its breeding, its population dynamics. All we know is that it was “[g]enerally most vocal at dawn: most recordings of its spontaneous songs were made at this time of day.” (Birds of the World)
It was described in 2014, when I was seven years old, based on reexamined vocal data and specimens. It hadn’t been recognized as distinct before then, due to confusion with the Alagoas Foliage-Gleaner, which was last seen five years later.
I have no words for this kind of loss, this retroactive grief that cannot be expected or rationalized. It is simply disorienting. Evolutionarily, it must have been fascinating, that two species in different genera could look so alike that we didn’t realize they were distinct for decades. But simply writing that it “must have been fascinating” is too devastating for me. I can listen to its harsh, decidedly unmusical song countless times, but no photographs exist of it in life. Isn’t that fitting? A species so unobtrusive in appearance has left no visible record of its living presence.
Here there are no photographs to take comfort in, no videos to stare, through tears, at a delightfully living bird bouncing through tangles of vines. Here you can only listen. Here the bird must be imagined. Think: at dawn, the sun peers over the dusky hill-bound horizon with warm beams reaching through the greenish-brown canopy, and what we know now to be Cichlocolaptes mazarbarnettii sings, at its favorite time of day.
Owen Robertson is a seventeen-year-old birder from Louisville, Colorado. An incoming first-year at Yale University, he works at Front Range Birding & Optics. Owen has participated in the American Birding Association Young Birder of the Year program for the last four years and received first-place honors for his writing and community leadership work. He has been a birder for over ten years and is incredibly grateful to his loving family for their support. The bird he’d most like to see (or hear!) next is the Bicknell’s Thrush.
