An elusive bird with a tendency to hide among the grassy vegetation of central China’s mountainous terrain was finally confirmed to be a new species, thanks to its distinctive song.
Meet the Sichuan bush warbler, which made its debut in a paper published in Avian Research on Friday. Its scientific name is Locustella chengi, after the late Chinese ornithologist Cheng Tso-hsin.
The Sichuan bush warbler looks a lot like another species, the Russet bush warbler. Both birds live more or less in the same places.
But the “exceedingly secretive” Sichuan bush warbler sounds quite different from its neighbor, a Michigan State University biologist who co-authored the paper said in a statement.
“Its distinctive song … consists of a low-pitched drawn-out buzz, followed by a shorter click, repeated in series,” Pamela Rasmussen said.
Although exceedingly hard to spot, the new species appears to be pretty common in the region, she noted.
All of the specimens that researchers were able to examine turned out to be males, so it’s possible that a female Sichuan bush warbler could be more visually distinct.
The researchers didn’t seem too surprised to find a new species of bird among the warblers, the paper indicates. The Russet bush warbler, in particular, has a “long history of taxonomic confusion.”
