Elusive, Critically Endangered Bird —Was Spotted for the First Time in Five Years

One of the Closest Living Relatives of Dodos!!

Conservationists are racing to save the manumea, a chicken-sized bird that lives only on two Samoan islands, from extinction...

                      Sarah Kuta - Daily Correspondent - Smithsonian

"During a recent field survey, experts with the Samoa Conservation Society recorded numerous sightings of the manumea, also known as the tooth-billed pigeon. They’re hopeful they can still save the elusive bird from extinction.

“Although we couldn’t capture a photo this time—the bird’s quick movements in and out of the canopy, sudden and long viewing distance made it nearly impossible—the sightings are strong confirmation that the Manumea is still here,” the group wrote on Facebook on November 7.

The last confirmed sighting was in August 2020, according to Save the Manumea, a joint campaign from the Samoa Conservation Society and Samoa’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. The most recent known evidence of breeding was in December 2013, when a juvenile was spotted and photographed in a tree.

The manumea is the national bird of Samoa, an island nation in the South Pacific Ocean. It’s one of the few remaining close relatives of the dodo (Raphus cucullatus), the flightless bird that famously went extinct during the late 17th century, and it’s the only living member of the Didunculus genus, which means “little dodo” in Latin.

About the size of a small chicken, the manumea has a distinctive red, hooked bill with tooth-like features on the lower structure, or mandible. It has dark, reddish-brown feathers on its wings and dusky gray-blue plumage on its head and chest.

In the 1990s, an estimated 7,000 manumeas roamed freely throughout Samoa’s rainforests. The number has plunged since then. Today, between 50 and 150 mature individuals remain in existence—though that’s essentially an educated guess, as the cryptic birds are difficult to locate.

“The results of most recent surveys, which have aimed to simply detect the species in the field, have been inconclusive with only very few recent records,” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Conservationists haven’t stopped trying to find the mysterious creatures. The Samoa Conservation Society has organized six expeditions over the past three years, with the most recent search taking place from October 17 to November 13. During that period, experts documented five total sightings of the bird, per Live Science’s Whitney Isenhower.

During one instance, the expedition team was finishing up lunch when a manumea flew past.

“I had goosebumps all over,” Sefuiva Moeumu Uili, a conservationist with the Samoa Conservation Society who is known as the “manumea queen” among her colleagues, tells Nesia Daily’s Jacob McQuire and Ashlyn Vilash.

Manumea populations have declined in recent decades because of habitat loss, hunting bycatch and predation. Currently, conservationists are highly concerned about the impact of invasive rats and feral cats, which prey on the adult birds, chicks and eggs. Their effect on the birds is “certainly catastrophic,” according to Joe Wood, a conservation biologist at the Toledo Zoo & Aquarium who co-chairs the IUCN’s group working to preserve pigeon and dove species.

“There has to be some kind of control program,” he tells Live Science.

Scientists are also collaborating with Indigenous communities—and using artificial intelligence—in hopes of better identifying the manumea’s cooing call. Few recordings exist, and the vocalizations are difficult to distinguish from those of another common bird, the lupe, also known as the Pacific imperial pigeon."