Following a grueling 14-day trek, a team of mountaineers and conservationists has photographed the elusive blue-fronted lorikeet in the highlands of eastern Indonesia’s Buru Island. This is only the second photographed record of the parrot in more than 100 years, according to bird conservation groups. The blue-fronted lorikeet (Charmosynopsis toxopei) is a small species found only in the island of Buru. The bird, which has a lime-green plumage, an orange beak and a pointed tail, was first identified from seven museum specimens collected in the 1920s. The avian species went undetected despite surveys conducted in the lowland and mid-elevation forests they’re described from, until it was photographed in 2014 by Craig Robson during a birding tour, according to the Search for Lost Birds project, a global partnership between the NGOs American Bird Conservancy (ABC), Re:wild and BirdLife International. In April 2026, Indonesian mountaineering group Kanal Buru, which included researchers from ABC, Birdtour Asia and Yayasan Planet Indonesia, led an expedition in Buru. They scaled the limestone terrain of Mount Kapalatmada in the west of the island to reach a 2,700meter (8,900-foot) summit cloud forest and successfully photographed the parrot. The team also captured its high-pitched calls for the first time. “We noticed two small birds fly into a nearby tree so I picked up my binoculars to see what one of them was,” John C. Mittermeier, director of the Search for Lost Birds at ABC and part of the expedition, said in a statement by the ABC. “I short-circuited with…This article was originally published on Mongabay
