The Friends of Charles Darwin

An international expedition has found a bird species new to science on a remote island in the northern Philippines. The team of Filipino and UK researchers discovered the bird, a rail, living by a stream in the forests of Calayan. They think the birds number only about 200 pairs at most, and since they are found nowhere else they might soon be at risk from development pressures. They say the Calayan rail is flightless "or nearly so": it belongs to a global family including coots and moorhens… [T]he birds were new to science, though not to the island's people, who call them "piding".