Worcester’s Buttonquail, a rare and poorly known bird found only in the Philippines has been photographed alive for the first time and confirmed to still exist, the Wild Bird Club of the Philippines reports.
“This is a very important finding,” said Arne Jensen, a Danish ornithologist and biodiversity expert, long-time resident of the Philippines and head of the Records Committee of the Wild Bird Club of the Philippines.
“Once you don’t see a bird species in a generation, you start to wonder if it’s extinct, and for this bird species we simply do not know its status at all.”
The Worcester’s Buttonquail is found only on Luzon and it may be a threatened endemic species. Unfortunately, there is extremely little information about this bird. Its breeding area remains unknown although it is suspected to be a rare resident of the high mountain grasslands of the Cordilleras. It was first described based on specimens purchased in Quinta Market in Manila in 1902.
The bird was named after Dean Conant Worcester, an American zoologist and public official specializing in the Philippines around that time. Since then just a few single specimens have been documented from Nueva Vizcaya and Benguet, and lately, in 2007, from Mountain Province by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.
