In a pleasant change from reports of new bird flu strains being found, a new bird was found the other day. Welcome to the flock, Bugun Liocichla.

He’s “a kind of babbler” – something I haven’t heard of, but easy enough to imagine the sound he makes. Black cap, bright yellow patch around the eyes and yellow, crimson, black and white patches on the wings. So good-looking, in fact, that it’s surprising it took so long to spot him.

Alert tree-watcher Ramana Athreya of Mumbai’s Natural History Society, who is usually looking a little higher up because he’s an astronomer, gets the credit for adding to the avian roll call, and for finding the first new bird species in India in more than 50 years.

Ramana actually spotted the bird in May at the Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary in northeastern Arunachal Pradesh state by the Chinese and Burmese borders.

He caught two of them, kept them long enough to take pictures and notes and record their song, and released them. “We thought the bird was just too rare for one to be killed,” he said. Good call!

He gave it the name, after the local Bugun tribe, and submitted his documentation to the experts to verify the new species. The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature approved the name, and its Latin tag, Liocichla bugunorum.

“The discovery of a new bird is really special,” Indian Birds editor Aasheesh Pittie told Associated Press, “but when it’s a stunning species with no geographically close relatives, and in a part of the world where bird collectors have sampled birds for more than a century, it’s nothing short of miraculous.”

The known population of the Bugun Liocichla consists of only 14, including three breeding pairs.

In fact, it was only a couple of weeks before Ramana’s announcement that ornithologists found another new species, in the Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve in eastern Nepal. It’s called rato baksha arjunak, which describes its red upper breast.

It’s nice there are still new birds out there to be found. It’s doubly nice when the revelations are accompanied on the newswire by something like this:

The total number of worldwide cellular phone connections now stands at 2.5 billion – just 12 months after passing the two billion mark. Growth is currently running at more than 40 million new connections per month. A quarter of the growth is coming from China and India.

Pay no attention, Ramana – keep listening to the woods!

The Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary sounds like an amazing place. Read more about it here and here.