New Bird, Who Dis?

It's no secret that some of the most cursed creatures are found in jungles. Where else would you find venomous snakes and bugs, or poisonous frogs and lizards without needing to walk too far to see them? There are even some of the most cursed plants that coexist with the other odd creatures.

For example, have you ever heard of a carrion flower? It's ok if you haven't, because we don't really have a jungle/rainforest in North America. In case you were curious, carrion flowers smell like rotting corpses to attract their pollinators and in some cases prey. So, be glad they don't really show up outside of the jungle/rainforest habitat, much like today's blog post focus: two poisonous birds.

Please remember that poisonous and venomous mean two different things. If it bites you and you die, it's venomous, whereas if you bite it and you die, it's poisonous. These two new species of poisonous bird that have been discovered deep in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. The birds have the same neurotoxin in their feathers that poison dart frogs have in their skin, it's just not as concentrated of a dose. So, while drinking water from a pot that a poison dart frog has decided to soak in might kill you, handling these two birds, the rufous-naped bellbird and the regent whistler, sets off a reaction closer to allergies or cutting an onion. When exposed to a higher concentration of their poison, it causes muscle cramps and cardiac arrest almost immediately after contact.

Surprisingly, the discovery of new species of bird is something that seems to happen every few years and more often than not in jungle or tropical environments. In fact, in 2013, 10 new songbirds (to our knowledge, not poisonous) were discovered off the eastern coast of Sulawesi, an island in the Indonesian archipelago. The significance with this new species discovery is pretty significant, especially as other species of bird are declared endangered or go extinct.

Just because we lose a species doesn't mean we won't have future biodiversity and that's something to really think about especially when looking at larger land mammals. How long until we see a new species of wolf, coyote, bear, or rodent? It may not be as far off as we are thinking.

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