News
‘Lost’ bird reappears in West Africa’s forests after more than a decade
‘Lost’ bird reappears in West Africa’s forests after more than a decade. Originally published by Mongabay.
By John Cannon · 2026-09-24T15:21:03.706Z
When Paulo Ditzel first laid eyes on the bird, he knew he’d seen something special: a vibrant orange body with yellow and black wings and tail feathers, topped by a dark head set off by almost whimsical splashes of copper on its cheek. “My brain registered, it’s the Ghana cuckooshrike,” Ditzel, a field research fellow with the International Bird Conservation Partnership https://www.birdpartners.org/ IBCP , tells Mongabay. A surge of excitement rippled through him, he says. Still, the sighting also immediately sparked “the most chaotic calm,” as he stood next to his partner and teammate Stephanie Bartlett on a bridge not far from an ecological research station in Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï National Park. “OK, what do I do?” he says he remembers thinking. “Priority right now is that Stephanie gets a picture.” Over the next few moments, Ditzel locked onto the bird with his binoculars and called out its movements to Bartlett, also an IBCP field research fellow. In almost choreographed coordination, Bartlett trained her camera lens on the branches across the stream and pressed the shutter button. “I got a photo of the bird before I saw it,” Bartlett says. In six months of bird surveys in West Africa supported by U.S. based IBCP, she says, she’d come to expect only fleeting glances of the region’s birds. “They’re scared of you. You don’t get to get close to them, and so often you have to use the camera as a tool for identification.” “If I had seen that bird with anyone else, it wouldn’t have worked out, and we would not have gotten a picture,” Ditzel adds. “We have this perfect little way.” That afternoon, Bartlett and Ditzel had gone out for a stroll to look for birds in this recess of Taï National Park, as they have in countless other places around the world for years. Nearing the end of their expedition across four West African countries, they entertained only a faint idea that they might catch a glimpse of Lobotos lobatus — the Ghana cuckooshrike, or sometimes the western wattled cuckooshrike. The bird had turned up in parts of West Africa’s Upper Guinean rainforest as early as the 1970s. Ornithologists figure its range stretches from Sierra Leone and Guinea in the west to Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana in the east, often in the canopy of primary forest but also in logged forests and plantations https://searchforlostbirds.org/birds/ghana cuckooshrike . The last verified sighting was in Ghana’s Atewa Forest https://news.mongabay.com/2026/09/illegal mines threaten biodiversity and drinking water in ghanas atewa forest/ in 2013. On that day in June, however, there it was, moving through the forest crown with chestnut capped flycatchers Erythrocercus mccallii and a white breasted nigrita Nigrita fusconotus — a “mixed species flock” in ornithologists’ parlance. As Bartlett took photos and video, Ditzel ran back to the station to get their colleagues. By the time they arrived, the cuckooshrike had disappeared. The team scanned the canopy for a few moments, but rain looked imminent, so they left Bartlett and Ditzel on the bridge and headed back to the station. Not long after, the bird reappeared and snatched a fuzzy white caterpillar. Then, just as quickly as it appeared, it was gone. The team didn’t see the bird again, even on a 15 kilometer 9.3 mile hike through the forest the next day. Still, they had snapped “probably the best photos ever taken of this bird,” says John Mittermeier, who is based at the American Bird Conservancy ABC and director of the Search for Lost Birds https://searchforlostbirds.org/ , a global partnership of conservation organizations promoting bird species not recorded in a decade. Ditzel and Bartlett say luck played a role in their success. But Nico Arcilla, IBCP’s president and research director who’s based in Sweden, says they had “the technical skill” to spot the bird and document it. Arcilla notes that rarely seen birds are often small and nondescript. But the Ghana cuckooshrike is “super flashy.” “It’s just such a beautiful bird,” she adds. But why did such a striking bird drop off scientists’ radar for so long? And perhaps more importantly, how might researchers ensure that the species survives? Its reappearance after 13 years suggests that ongoing efforts to protect places like Taï National Park are critical, the researchers say. Taï is a stronghold of wildlife habitat in the Upper Guinean rainforest. But logging and agriculture have whittled that expanse down into fragments of standing forests https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/the quest to reconnect imperiled rainforest in west africa/ scattered across the once formidable range. Even places like Taï face ongoing threats: Protectors there struggle to keep artisanal gold mining and illegal hunting out of the park. The sighting of the cuckooshrike, however, is proof to Yendoubouam Kourdjouak, IBCP West Africa project manager and a member of the expedition team, that protection efforts must be redoubled and populations monitored. “This rediscovery proves that the bird is not extinct,” says Kourdjouak in a text message to Mongabay. “ I t’s also a positive sign for local biodiversity and offers hope for conservation efforts within Taï National Park.” ‘Impactful’ fieldwork By the time Ditzel, Bartlett and the team arrived in Côte d’Ivoire, they had noted the cuckooshrike’s listing by the Search for Lost Birds https://searchforlostbirds.org/birds/ghana cuckooshrike , and they knew Taï would offer them a chance to see it. Still, Bartlett says, “I’m like, this is never gonna happen.” By the time they arrived at the ecological research station on the afternoon of June 19, they had driven along winding and jarring roads — when there were roads to take. The researchers say they would often hope to find a village so they could get directions to the next passable bridge that would get them a little closer to the park. “It’s the least glamorous fieldwork you could be doing,” Bartlett says, “but the most impactful.” Working with IBCP has sparked a passion for birds in Kourdjouak, who is from Togo, so much so that he says he plans to pursue a master’s degree related to ornithology to complement his undergraduate studies in zoology. At the research station, however, he stayed behind when Bartlett and Ditzel went birding. On that afternoon, the team’s car needed servicing, and he had clothes to wash. In six months of traveling through four countries, Bartlett, who is from the U.S., and Ditzel, who is from Brazil, had come to realize the crucial roles that Kourdjouak and their West African teammates play in bringing birds like the Ghana cuckooshrike to the broader attention of the global birding community. They secured official documents and sorted out the logistical minutiae for road trips that took days to reach research sites. Along the way, they provided critical links to local communities and park guards and helped sort out basic needs. “To say they were vital for this project is an understatement,” Ditzel says. Kourdjouak and the rest of the team didn’t catch a glimpse of the cuckooshrike on that June day. Even Bartlett and Ditzel only had a couple of good looks at the bird over the 10 or so minutes they spent with it. And for now, those observations — of the bird traveling with other species in the canopy or eating that caterpillar — add to the scant observations compiled by earlier researchers https://searchforlostbirds.org/birds/ghana cuckooshrike . Older reports suggest it makes a soft “tisk, tisk” sound, but recordings of its vocalizations don’t exist. “Taï is a treasure for biodiversity conservation in Côte d’Ivoire and indeed throughout West Africa,” says Saint Guillaume Odoukpe, an ornithologist and assistant professor at Côte d’Ivoire’s Université Félix Houphouët Boigny who organized and accompanied the IBCP expedition in the country. “I think there is plenty more to discover in this forest.” A key goal of the team’s expedition was to scout areas where researchers could return, as well as to develop and strengthen connections with the researchers and communities that make the work possible. It’s in places like West Africa, with vibrant birdlife but a paucity of recent documentation, that the Search for Lost Birds initiative can be particularly helpful, Mittermeier says. “We have this sense sometimes that there’s nothing left to explore,” he tells Mongabay. “But actually, there’s so many things left to explore, and in a way, these lost birds are a call to exploration.” When the Search for Lost Birds was started in 2021, bringing together ABC, BirdLife International and the U.S. based conservation NGO Re:wild, the aim was to inspire action to find species that hadn’t been documented by Western science in at least a decade. Understanding where — or in some cases, if — these species persist is a critical first step in protecting them, Mittermeier says. “You can’t really make an effective conservation plan for a species that nobody’s seen in 10 years,” he adds. “You’re not sure how it’s doing. You’re not sure where it is. So the driving force from our side is saying, let’s collaborate with the global birding community.” With the advent of apps like eBird and Merlin Bird ID, anyone with a smartphone can now contribute to global ornithological knowledge. The statistics demonstrate the impact that crowdsourcing data can have: Of the more than 11,000 known species of bird, as of September 2026 https://searchforlostbirds.org/birds , only 114 of them have escaped documentation in the past decade, Mittermeier explains. And of those, around 70 have never been photographed at all. “We have all this amazing power as birders and conservationists around the world submitting all these records,” Mittermeier says. Given the tools at the fingertips of birders and ornithologists, he adds, it seems as if there shouldn’t be any of “these question marks on the map.” And yet, these lost birds exist, so every opportunity to remove one from the list is momentous. “Anytime one gets found, it’s just such a cool and exciting result,” he says, and the sighting in Taï was particularly so. “The fact that they were aware of this species as a lost bird and thinking of it as something to look out for is wonderful because that’s really what we want — to highlight these gaps to the community and have people be aware of them.” A variety of factors help explain why birds disappear from the photographic record for years, decades or longer in an age of ubiquitous camera phones and an ever more sophisticated birding community comprising professional ornithologists and sleuthing citizen scientists. Their populations might be quite low, or they might be extinct altogether. In his own fieldwork, Mittermeier has pursued the Makira moorhen Gallinula silvestris for months in the forests of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. It’s a species known from only one specimen, and it hasn’t been seen in almost 100 years. “If there was one species that I wanted a miracle rediscovery for, I’d probably pick that one,” he says. Still, he acknowledges it might never be found. “The reality is that some of them are going to be extinct,” Mittermeier adds. “As tragic as that is, that’s also a really important story to tell.” In other cases, Mittermeier notes, lost birds might be “taxonomic mysteries.” “We have a few examples of birds that are known from a single specimen, described sometimes over a century ago,” he says. “Is this a species, or is it a hybrid, or is it some form of something else?” Behavior can also help birds evade binoculars and camera lenses pointed in their direction. In the cuckooshrike’s case, its preference for the canopy means it’s hard to find. “Despite the fact that it’s got these incredible bright colors, it’s a really tricky bird to pin down,” Mittermeier says. And geography can also play a role, as in the case of West Africa. “There’s so little actual fieldwork happening there with birds,” Ditzel says. “There’s a lot of birds that are completely underrepresented in the science.” Of course, it’s often a combination of these factors, some of which are outside the control of the ornithology community. Groups like ICBP can help address gaps in understanding, which can start with spotting a bird like the Ghana cuckooshrike. Such exciting findings help make the case for its continued protection — and clarify how little is known about birds in the region. “It encapsulates just how beautiful and amazing all this life in West Africa is,” IBCP’s Arcilla says. Still, it also underscores the stress the region’s forests face, increasing the urgency to document more species and their behavior. Ditzel and Bartlett say they plan to return to West Africa and to Taï for more fieldwork in the next year. And for Arcilla, the cuckooshrike sighting offers a glimmer of hope mixed with a dose of pragmatism. “It’s there for the finding. It’s there for the discovery, and it can still be saved,” she says. “But all of these forests, these habitats, this wildlife, all of these birds are very, very threatened.” Banner image: A Ghana cuckooshrike in Côte d’Ivoire. Image by Stephanie Bartlett. John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/john cannon.bsky.social and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnccannon/ . In search of the ‘rare and beautiful’ in an Ivorian rainforest https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/in search of the rare and beautiful in an ivorian rainforest/ The quest to reconnect imperiled rainforest in West Africa https://news.mongabay.com/2026/06/the quest to reconnect imperiled rainforest in west africa/ FEEDBACK: Use this form https://form.jotform.com/70064259869164 to send a message to the author of this post. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the page.