Searching for Lost Birds: rediscoveries, extinctions and the potential to find the remaining species

The Search for Lost Birds was founded in 2021 with the goal of supporting efforts to search for and update the conservation status of birds with no recent documented observations. There have been a number of exciting rediscoveries of these ‘lost’ species in the past four years with birds like the New Britain Goshawk, Black-naped Pheasant-pigeon, White-tailed Tityra, and Black-lored Waxbill all recorded for the first time in decades. But there are still more than a hundred species on the Lost Birds list waiting to be found or, in some cases, proven extinct. In this webinar, John Mittermeier and Alex Berryman review the past four years of Lost Birds – how many species have been rediscovered in total? Which were the most surprising? How many lost birds have become extinct? – and explore the prospects for finding the remaining lost species. 
 John C. Mittermeier, PhD Director of the Search for Lost Birds, American Bird ConservancyJohn works as the director of the Search for Lost Birds at American Bird Conservancy, managing the global list of lost bird species and supporting projects to search for lost birds around the world. He has done field research on lost species in Samoa, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Madagascar, among other places. 
 Alex BerrymanSenior Red List Officer, BirdLife InternationalScientific Associate, Natural History Museum UKAlex works for BirdLife International as a Senior Red List Officer, leading on the organisation’s IUCN Red List assessments for Asia. He is the BirdLife lead for Search for Lost Birds, helping each year to curate the updated list of lost bird species. He has published extensively on avian taxonomy and conservation, with a particular interest in the world’s poorly known birds. He also sits on the BirdLife Taxonomic Working Group and is a member of the IUCN SSC Asian Songbird Trade Specialist Group.