In Search of the Phantom Tanager (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine June 2002

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In Search of the Phantom Tanager (Cont.)

NOW THAT WE WERE in the field, though, we were beginning to appreciate the sheer weight of geography that was against us. The cone-billed tanager, as near as anyone can tell, was a creature of the woodland edge, and we'd been looking for several days for just this kind of low, dry forest habitat on sandy soil. Moving in single file, we followed a meager trail through the forest, Doug hauling a voluminous blue backpack from whose top protruded a telephoto lens the size of a kitchen waste can. I've known

We were following a clue, the sort of accidental lead that can change everthing, we'd heard from an old man of a ghost town called Juruena.

Doug professionally for more than a decade, and after I began working on a book about the search for animals that might or might not be extinct, we started planning a collaborative hunt in South America. Tall and lanky, with a boyishness that belies his 49 years, Doug was the ideal partner—a trained ornithologist and a respected wildlife photographer, he directs VIREO (Visual Resources for Ornithology), an ambitious photo archive at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia that will house photographic documentation of all the world's 9,600 or so species of birds.

I had my heavy tape recorder slung over one shoulder and an 18-inch-long shotgun microphone hung in a leather holster at my belt. While Doug played a tape of the black-and-white tanager (the conebill's nearest relative, which we hoped might entice the rarer bird into view), I was recording unidentified birdsongs and playing them back, usually luring the singer into view as it hunted for what it assumed was an intruder.

The conebill's there-and-gone history is unusual, but by no means unique. There are a number of South American birds that turned up in specimen collections in the 19th and early 20th centuries, never to be seen again—like the buff-cheeked tody-flycatcher, a tiny bird with a name longer than itself, collected just once, in 1830 in Brazil. Yet despite the long stretches since their original discoveries, some birds have recently been relocated; they include the Tumaco seedeater, first collected in 1912 on a tiny island off the Colombian coast and not found there again until the mid-1990s. A case that gave us particular hope was that of the cherry-throated tanager from eastern Brazil—first recorded in the mid-19th century, it vanished for more than 100 years, was briefly sighted in 1941, and then dropped from sight again for almost six decades before it resurfaced in Espirito Santo on Brazil's eastern coast in 1998.

The biggest hurdle we faced was simply not knowing where to look. The entire canon on the cone-billed tanager consists of two scientific journal articles, both by Jacques Berlioz, who had examined Vellard's collection of Brazilian birds. In 1939, Berlioz published a brief, seven-paragraph note in the Bulletin of the British Ornithology Club announcing the discovery of a new species of tanager in central Brazil; after the war, he followed this up in a French ornithological journal with a somewhat longer description of the specimen and a list of the other birds Vellard had collected on the trip.

The papers indicate that Vellard shot the bird "at Juruena, northeast of Cuyaba, Matto Grosso (Central Brazil)." This is less straightforward than it may appear. "Juruena" could refer to either the 600-mile-long river by that name or to a city on its lower reaches, near the northwestern corner of Mato Grosso. But both are several hundred miles northwest of Cuiabá (as it is now spelled)—not northeast, as both papers state. No one knows if the error was made by Vellard (perhaps through poor record-keeping or unfamiliarity with the region) or by Berlioz, but attempts over the years to clarify the issue failed.

We did have one powerful clue—the other birds that Vellard collected on the same expedition. Taken together, they point to the intersection of Brazil's three great ecosystems, which link hands in western Mato Grosso—the seasonally flooded Pantanal marshes to the south of Cuiabá, the Amazonian rainforests to the north, and the belt of cerrado grassland stretching across the midriff of the state, mostly at higher elevations. Putting our heads together with birders and ornithologists in Brazil and the United States, we decided to aim for the western fringe of Mato Grosso, beyond the Rio Paraguai and close to Bolivia, where several large chapadas, or plateaus, meet the upper Juruena, Guaporé, and other rivers. This region, we felt, offered the best chance for the right habitat—low, scrubby, dry forest at the edge of the cerrado, which we had finally found.

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