It sounds like any other morning, far removed from the cacophony of urban existence. A winged insect buzzes in. A gecko marks its presence by making a clicking sound. A fairly impatient cooing, somewhere in the background, grows stronger as you close your eyes and visualise the setting of this audio clip. And then comes the most important element of this 47-second recording: A series of chirps, almost set to a rhythmic pattern of eight beats.

To the uninitiated, this bird call is likely to mean nothing. It sounds simple, stable and uniform. Except that, it is music to an ornithologist’s ear. The creature these chirps belong to is a new honeyeater — a family of diverse, small- to medium-sized birds that actually eat more than just honey (fruits and insects, for instance). And this piece of good news — hard to come by in a world which has just lost its last male white northern rhino — comes from the tiny Indonesian island of Rote.

A mere dot on the map near Timor, Rote was, for long, untouched by tourism. But it is no longer a stranger to deforestation and so-called infrastructural development. In a phone interview to BL ink from Singapore, Pratibha Baveja, a student of the Avian Evolution Lab at National University of Singapore (NUS), informs that the Rote Myzomela — “a dressy, colourful songbird”, in her words — has been formally named after Indonesia’s First Lady Iriana Joko Widodo. The objective, Baveja adds, is to draw attention to the habitat of the bird, which is under threat. Baveja is part of the NUS team that worked with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences to identify the new species.

One may argue that the Rote Myzomela is not a “new” bird. Which is true. For years it lived under the shadow of the Sumba Myzomela. Both birds may appear identical to the untrained eye, thanks to a scarlet head and rump, and a black body. Baveja says that the first person to record the Rote population was Australian ornithologist Ron Johnstone. It was way back in 1990, and the man couldn’t manage a photograph or call recording. Cut to 2009, when Belgian birders Philippe Verbelen and Veerle Dossche returned home from Rote with several sound clips. That’s when the idea of a different species crept into their minds.

This called for several trips to the island, following which, in 2015, four birds were collected for further analysis. A procedure called mist netting was used to capture these honeyeaters. (Mist netting, explains Baveja, involves casting a nylon or polyester mesh between two trees or poles.)

The following year was used to put the notes together and publish a research paper on the identification of the species. Baveja, who joined the NUS lab in August 2016, played a vital role in the writing of the paper, apart from the bioacoustics analysis of call recordings. Dr Frank Erwin Rheindt of NUS helmed the project, which started getting talked about in late 2017-early 2018.

Elaborating on her role in the project — and also her first brush with bioacoustics — Baveja, alumnus of Delhi’s Hindu College, says the difference in the calls of these two similar-looking honeyeaters and the importance of bioacoustics data is crucial when morphological (external form) distinctions between species is limited. “Vocalisation — the range, the notes, the variations — is a more reliable indicator in some birds than morphological traits,” she says. In birds, songs are used to attract mates and in courtship, while calls could be contact calls or alarm calls. “In the case of Myzomela, the wide repertoire of vocalisations makes it difficult to distinguish between these two,” says Baveja. This meant that she had to compare the homologous call types of the two species without this distinction.

In an email to BL ink , Rheindt says: “The Rote Myzomela is the latest of a number of new bird species described from this diverse but underexplored region... eastern Indonesia is one of the last frontiers whence to expect additional discoveries in the coming years.”

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