bye bye birdy

[buddy55]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A guy walks into a restaurant in the Philippines and orders roast fowl. “How would you like it?” asks the waiter. “Rare,” he says…

Well, they don’t get much rarer than this.

In January, a team making a documentary about traditional bird-trapping methods in Luzon captured an image of a bird that was thought to be extinct.



The specimen caught the eye of ornithologist Desmond Allen, a member of the Wild Bird Club of the Philippines, who spotted it in a photo accompanying the credits. He identified its species as Worcester’s buttonquail (Turnix worcesteri), a bird whose presence hadn’t been recorded for more than a century.

Cause for celebration?

You might think so, except for one tiny problem: Shortly after being photographed, the bird was sold for about 20 cents and eaten! It made for a bittersweet experience for Filipino birdwatchers.

“What if this was the last of its species?” worried Mike Lu, the Wild Bird Club’s president.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGikx56SmSg
For the moment, all ornithologists can do is watch and wait, in hopes that Worcester’s buttonquail will show up again someday, preferably with a little more lag time before dinner. At least the documentary crew came up with an apt name for their production: It’s called Bye-Bye Birdie.

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