A photograph put the Ghana cuckooshrike back on the record in Côte d'Ivoire

Mongabay reported on November 3, 2026, that researchers photographed a Ghana cuckooshrike in Taï National Park in Côte d'Ivoire, the first scientific documentation of the bird in 13 years. The last record was in 2013, in Ghana's Atewa Forest. Stephanie Bartlett, a field fellow with the International Bird Conservation Partnership, got the picture while Paulo Ditzel called out the bird's movements. She told Mongabay she identified it from the photo before she had a clear look, because the birds will not let people come close. The image shows a small bird with an orange body and black and yellow wings.

Ditzel said West African researchers on the surveys were essential. The species, Lobotos lobatus, is thought to range from Guinea to Ghana in the Upper Guinean rainforest, in forest that logging and farms have broken into patches. It was on the Search for Lost Birds list, which tracks species with no documentation for more than a decade. John Mittermeier, of the American Bird Conservancy and the lost-birds project, said a conservation plan is hard to write for a bird nobody has recorded in ten years. Saint Guillaume Odoukpe, an ornithologist at Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny who organized the Côte d'Ivoire trip, called Taï a treasure and said more is still there to find. The photograph is one bird in one park. It is not a population estimate.