From bee-eaters to parrots, cuckoos, owls, cranes, rails, spoonbills, eagles, ducks and sparrows, the country of Gabon is home to a great diversity of birds. Some 752 different species have been described in this west central African country. This summer, a team of Smithsonian scientists added one more bird to that list, the olive-backed forest robin (iphrornis pyrrholaemus), found in the primary lowland forests in southwest Gabon.

First observed in 2001 during a field expedition of the Smithsonian National Zoological Park’s Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity Program, the robins have a fiery orange throat and breast, yellow belly, an olive back and black head feathers. Both sexes have a distinctive white dot of tiny feathers in front of each eye.

Brian Schmidt, an ornithologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and a member of the Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity team, collected the first specimen of the bird for the museum in 2001. In 2003 more specimens were collected. “Once I was able to compare them side by side to other specimens in our collections, it was clear that these birds were special,” Schmidt says.

While Schmidt studied and described the physical morphology of the robin, geneticists at the National Zoo compared its DNA to the DNA of four known forest robin species. Genetic testing confirmed that the new robin was a species previously unknown to science.

Robert Fleischer, head of the National Zoo’s Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics; National Zoo researchers Jeffrey Foster and Kate Durrant; and George Angehr of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute were co-authors with Schmidt of the paper describing the new bird. It was published in the journal Zootaxa in August.

The Monitoring and Assessment of Biodiversity Program, which facilitated the discovery of this new bird, is part of the National Zoo’s Center for Conservation Education and Sustainability. The program is working with the Gabonese government and Shell Gabon to integrate biodiversity conservation into energy development.