*A Minahasa Hooded Pitta emerges from an old hard drive, Gunung Tangkoko 2006 (Mike Watson)*

AS A BIRDER, if you were only allowed one book, then ‘All the Birds of the World’ by Josep del Hoyo, published by Lynx would be it! I bought a copy during the first pandemic lockdown, with the intention of copying my pal Pete Morris’s idea of adding gold stickers to the birds I’ve seen. Spectrum alert! First of all I would have to figure out which birds I’d seen - I’ve never kept a world life list but I do have all my records consisting of various notebooks and papers so it was a feasible task. Then I would be able to use the iGoTerra list to know which stickers to add to the book. In the end I never got around to this during the pandemic, there were too many other things to do with the extra free time, like birding itself. However, time ticks away and I find myself thinking there’s not so much of it left as there used to be. So, I sat down one day and finished the task of uploading sightings to our favourite listing service iGoTerra, taking until 3am next morning. It’s not that difficult if you just add fast track ticks (my next task is to add the details of the first observations, at least, later) but there’s no way I could remember all those fancy-named hummingbirds and obscure tryant flycatchers (the world’s two largest bird families) so I had to do a lot of checking of notes and paper checklists. Can you imagine how many taxonomic and name changes there have been since my first visit outside the WP in 1990? It’s been great fun reliving past trips and checking how taxonomic changes have affected what I have seen. I reached my favourite bird family, pittas and saw the page in ATBOW almost filled with the new species resulting from the splitting of the Red-bellied complex. Why had we not tried harder to see one on Sulawesi, or Halmahera, or New Britain? Oh dear! Another spectrum alert! I did see one on Batanta island though - now Papuan Pitta - the same species, some of which spend the Austral summer in Australia’s Iron Range.

I fared better with hooded pittas, by chance seeing three out of the new four species. Western Hooded Pitta in Thailand and Eastern Hooded Pitta in PNG and to my surprise, the hooded pitta we saw way back in 2006 on Gunung Tangkoko in Northern Sulawesi is now split as Minahasa Hooded Pitta. I mentioned this to Pete at work, and he hurriedly checked his list to find that he had not seen the former subspecies forsteni! Surprising as there are hardly any birds I’ve seen that he hasn’t among his 9000+, including almost 40 pittas. Even more surprising, there are hardly any records of Minahasa Hooded Pitta on eBird, and no photos. The headline photo is even of some vegetation, from which one was calling by Pam Rasmussen! There are a few scattered records of it all along the octopus tentacle-like Minahasa Peninsula of Northern Sulawesi and I am sure that now it is split as a separate species more effort will be made to look for it.

A little about our encounter on 13 September 2006. Juhász Tibor and Ványi Robi, along with Stuart Warren had arranged to camp on Gunung Tangkoko through local birder Untu Baware, primarily for Scaly-breasted Kingfisher. We saw staggered about three quarters of the way up the mountain and camped overnight, completing the next hour or so to the forested summit before dawn the next morning, where we saw the kingfisher. We descended slowly back to the camp for something to eat around lunchtime, and there was simply a hooded pitta in the forest around the camping area. It was quite obliging and allowed some decent photos but the morning belonged to the kingfisher. Fast forward 18 years to the present day and it seems the morning really belonged to the pitta, although we had no idea of this at the time. Happy memories of an exciting trip to the forest paradise of Indonesia with friends, some of whom are no longer with us - Robi, Kris Tindige and now dear Theo Henoch, who passed away last month. ‘Time is shorter than you think so let’s go’ Nick 13.

MINAHASA HOODED PITTA