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b"This week we'll learn about birds that are mysterious in one way or another. If you need more bird knowledge, check out the awesome\\xa0Casual Birder Podcast, especially this week's episode with a guest spot by me about indigo buntings!\\n\\nLots of pictures for this one, hoo boy.\\n\\nThe Nechisar nightjar wing. It's all we've got:\\n\\n\\n\\nJunkin's warbler, a mystery bird whose identity was solved by SCIENCE:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe lovely blue-eyed ground dove:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe two tapestries depicting a mystery bird:\\n\\n \\n\\nClose-ups of the mystery bird from the tapestries:\\n\\n \\n\\nA black grouse, that may have inspired the tapestry birds:\\n\\n\\n\\nA wandering albatross, which has the largest wingspan of any living bird known and will CURSE YOU:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe bee hummingbird, smallest living bird known, will only give tiny curses if it's really mad:\\n\\n\\n\\nAn olive-backed sunbird:\\n\\n\\n\\nA hermit hawkmoth, not even kidding that this thing looks and acts like a hummingbird:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe cahow, or Bermuda petrel:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nOn the same day this episode is released, the Casual Birder Podcast is releasing an episode about finches with a contribution from me. If you haven\\u2019t tried the Casual Birder Podcast, it\\u2019s a great show about birds and birding that I highly recommend. It\\u2019s 100% family friendly, the host\\u2019s voice is pleasant and calming, and it\\u2019s often funny and always interesting. I\\u2019ve got a link in the show notes, so head on over and try the finch episode, where you can hear me dropping some knowledge about the indigo bunting. And for any new listeners who came here from the Casual Birder Podcast, welcome! We\\u2019ve got a great episode this week about birds that are associated with a mystery in one way or another.\\n\\nWe\\u2019ll start in Ethiopia, specifically the Nechisar National Park in the Great Rift Valley. In 1990, a team of researchers was surveying a remote section of grassland in the park to see what animals lived there. One of the things they found was a dead bird, not in the field but on a dirt road, where it had been killed by a car. It was a type of nightjar, but the bird experts associated with the survey didn\\u2019t recognize it. The problem was, though, that the bird was pretty mangled and rotten. Only one wing was intact, so they took that wing back with them to the Natural History Museum in London and described a new species of nightjar from it. It\\u2019s called the Nechisar Nightjar, described in 1995 and named Caprimulgus solala. \\u2018Solala\\u2019 means \\u201conly a wing.\\u201d\\n\\nBut no one who knows about birds has ever conclusively seen a living Nechisar Nightjar: not an ornithologist or zoologist, not a bird watcher, not a local with more than casual knowledge of birds, no one. In 2009 a group of birders visited the park specifically to search for the nightjar, and caught a brief video of one flying away. But nightjars are night birds, so the video was shot at night with one of the birders holding a light, and as a result it\\u2019s not exactly great video quality. So while conservationists hold out hope that the bird isn\\u2019t actually super-rare, just lives in a hard to reach area, we still don\\u2019t know for sure.\\n\\nAt least we have the wing so we know the Nechisar nightjar actually exists. The wing has dark brown feathers with a pale wing panel. The birders who might have seen the nightjar in 2009 said its body was reddish-brown and it had white tail corners. Another bird, called the double-banded pheasant, is known only from a single feather found in 1871. We don\\u2019t even know where the feather came from, since it was found in a shipment of feathers sent to London to be used as hat decorations. Researchers today think it is probably just an aberrant feather taken from the well-known great argus pheasant, which lives in Borneo, Sumatra, and other islands in southeast Asia.\\n\\nNext we\\u2019ll visit New York state and a mystery warbler whose identity was solved by science. In 2006,"