When a field team arrived at the Abou Telfane wildlife reserve in central Chad last February, they were there to document wetlands for a UN-backed project – not to search for missing birds.
The reserve sits about six miles east of the town of Mongo, in country that visiting ornithologists rarely bother to reach.
One of them stopped on February 2 and trained a camera on a small rust-colored bird sitting in the open grass. The photographs that followed would end a 95-year silence.
Spotting the Rusty Lark
The species is the Rusty Lark, a small bird scientists know by the Latin name Calendulauda rufa.
British ornithologist Hubert Lynes first described it in 1920, after collecting six specimens in Sudan’s Darfur region.
Eleven years later, naturalist George Latimer Bates collected the last known specimens in what is now Niger.
After that, there was nothing to be found of the bird. There were zero confirmed sightings, photographs, or recordings for nearly a century.
Both early collections came from the same broad region of dry African grassland, far from any major scientific outpost.
After the discovery was made by Bates, the bird simply dropped off the scientific map.
A sighting in Chad
Pierre Defos du Rau, an ornithologist with the French Office for Biodiversity (OFB), spent hours watching a single bird in the Abou Telfane reserve on February 2.
He was roughly six miles east of Mongo in central Chad, where he spent hours watching, photographing, and filming.
Defos du Rau was there with Julien Birard of the Tour du Valat research institute and Idriss Dapsia from Chad’s wildlife directorate. The project was funded by the UN.
The same bird turned up again on February 15. This time it was spotted by other team members working out of nearby Mongo.
Confirming the identification
Photos alone don’t offer enough proof for this old of a record. The team sent images to four expert ornithologists including Per Alström, a lark specialist at Uppsala University.
Alström confirmed the bird’s identity by comparing it to museum specimens and other African larks. He has spent decades studying how larks are classified.
This confirmation, along with input from three other experts, settled the first modern record of the species.
The observation also landed on eBird, the global birding database, as the first documented sighting of a living Rusty Lark anywhere in the world.
A possible photo from 2017 had circulated earlier but was eventually ruled out.
Small and subtle birds
The Rusty Lark is small, measuring about 5 to 6 inches long, with rust-toned upper feathers and a faintly scaly back. Its tail is unusually long for a lark of its size, with no white edges along it.
These birds have gray-brown legs, a two-toned bill, and are pale below and dark on top.
None of those marks alone is dramatic, but together they separate it from the other small larks of the region.
Until this find, no one had photographed a living one. Specimens in museum drawers were the only physical evidence.
A 2020 study using genetic data reclassified the bird, separating it from the broader lark group it had always been placed in.
Residing in remote places
The Rusty Lark lives in the Sahel – a band of dry grassland below the Sahara – in savanna and semi-desert scrub.
Alström cited remoteness, political instability, and security concerns that keep much of the Sahel off the maps of working ornithologists.
This is the main reason the Rusty Lark stayed missing for so long.
There is not anything unusual about the bird itself, and there was not a sudden population collapse. There has simply never been anyone around with a camera.
Its known range spans roughly 116 million acres of African terrain, much of which can go years without a visit from a working ornithologist.
What is still unknown
Even now, basic things about the Rusty Lark are unknown. Nobody can describe its nest and its eggs remain unrecorded.
The birdsong hasn’t been captured either, even during the most recent February sighting. Insects and seeds make up most of its diet, similarly to other ground-dwelling larks.
Males reportedly drop sharply through the air in courtship displays, landing on rocks or low branches. But that detail comes from accounts almost a century old.
The future of the Rusty Lark
The Rusty Lark sat on a global watchlist of lost birds for almost a century. The species had not been photographed, recorded, or confirmed by scientists for at least a decade.
The tracking project has now removed it from the list, which changes what conservationists can do. With a confirmed habitat in Abou Telfane, the species will be surveyed and properly assessed for the first time.
Researchers can investigate whether Sahel populations are stable or quietly slipping, and whether other missing Sahel birds are simply unseen rather than gone.
The bird in central Chad sat for hours in plain view, calmly tolerating the people watching it.
After 95 years without a confirmed sighting, what finally revealed the species wasn’t a new discovery about the bird itself – it was simply someone being there to look.
The study is published in the journal Tour du Valat.
NOTE – This article was originally published in Earth and can be viewed here
