Yahoo News 8 Mar 08;
A rare bird not seen for nearly 80 years has reappeared in the South Pacific off Papua New Guinea, Britain's leading bird protection charity said Friday.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) said an expert who travelled on a ship northeast of the islands photographed more than 30 Beck's petrels, including young birds, which suggests a breeding site nearby.
Israeli ornithologist Hadoram Shirihai's account appears in the latest Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club, published Friday.
Only two records previously existed of the tube-nosed seabirds, both from the late 1920s when the ornithologist Rollo Beck collected two as he toured the region on a quest for museum specimens.
Shirihai said he may have seen the rare bird on a previous voyage in 2003 and returned last year to study them further. He said it marked the "rediscovery of the species".
The RSPB said hopes were raised that the bird was not extinct when a tour guide thought he had seen a Beck's petrel in the Coral Sea off northeast Australia in 2006.
But where the guide's photographic evidence was not conclusive, Shirihai's pictures "left no doubt", they added.
Protecting the species, which closely resembles the Tahiti petrel, could be difficult, given predators such as rats and cats at its breeding grounds, as well as widespread logging and land clearance for palm oil plantations.
Experts believe the birds may only visit nesting burrows at night, making conservation even more difficult.
"Even so, the discovery of this 'lost' bird is fantastic news and we congratulate those who spent so much time and effort in finding it," said Geoff Hilton, a senior RSPB biologist in a statement.
"It doesn't get much better than finding a species that was long thought extinct. Now we must use this discovery as a new spur to try to save the bird."
The Beck's petrel is classed by the BirdLife International umbrella group of conservation charities as critically endangered -- the highest level of threat. It has a dark brown back, head and throat and pale belly and flies low over seas with mainly straight wings.
It is slightly smaller and has narrower wings than the Tahiti petrel, which has been seen recently in the Bismarck Archipelago off north-east New Guinea, and the nearby Solomon Islands.
