ROTUND, ground-dwelling and disastrously trusting of humans, the dodo became the world’s poster species for extinction after vanishing from Mauritius in the 17th century, not long after Dutch sailors first laid eyes on it.
Now, Brazilian ornithologists say they’ve found its modern analogue deep in the Amazon: a chicken-like bird so unfazed by people it practically strolls up to introduce itself.
Meet the slaty-masked tinamou – a new species whose guileless behaviour is uncannily reminiscent of its ill-fated predecessor.
The comparison is “scientifically accurate”, said Luis Morais, a doctoral candidate in zoology at the Museu Nacional of Rio de Janeiro and lead author of the paper describing the species in the journal Zootaxa.
“The bird’s behaviour mirrors historical accounts of the extinct dodo, and its extinction risk is equally real.”
Found in the remote Serra do Divisor mountains of western Brazil, the slaty-masked tinamou looks, sounds and behaves like nothing else in its family.
Tinamous are usually shy and cryptic – forest phantoms that melt into the undergrowth. But this one is boldly done up in vivid cinnamon-rufous feathers with a dark stripe across the eyes, the “mask” that lends it its name.
And then there’s the personality.
After Morais’ team first detected its call in October 2021, it took three years of patient searching before they finally saw it.
Once they did, the bird behaved as though humans were just another bit of scenery, wandering calmly around the forest floor. On more than one occasion, individuals walked right up to the stunned researchers.
Its vocal display is equally odd. Tinamous normally stick to simple whistles and trills, but the slaty-masked tinamou belts out long, rising calls that ricochet around the valleys in ways that confuse any sense of distance.
“This bird is totally crazy-looking, and it is an opera singer,” said Diego Calderon-Franco, a Colombian biologist and expert on Neotropical birds who reviewed the findings and audio recordings before publication.
“It has a voice like no other – a voice that gains energy as it sings and bounces all over the walls of the valleys where it lives.”
The species’ scientific name, Tinamus resonans, refers to the eerie echo of its song. It is believed to be the first new small forest tinamou found in roughly 75 years.
“Someone finding a brand-new tinamou in the field is simply absurdly bananas,” Calderon-Franco said. “The fact that this bird has been hiding in a little remote corner of Brazil forever is mind-blowing.”
Like the dodo, the slaty-masked tinamou lives on an island – albeit a high-altitude one. Its known range is restricted to a narrow band above roughly 330m in the Serra do Divisor, an isolated outpost of the Andes on the border of Brazil and Peru. This “sky island” supports distinct plants and animals confined to tight ecological niches.
Five other small tinamou species inhabit the region, but none lives at higher elevations. That makes the newcomer a high-floor specialist on an ecological skyscraper – and dangerously exposed.
Species restricted to tight elevation ranges are “highly sensitive to climate change”, Morais said. As temperatures climb, montane animals often shift upward, but those already near the top have nowhere left to go. Scientists call this the “escalator to extinction”, and the slaty-masked tinamou is already riding uncomfortably close to the ceiling. Its total population is estimated at just 2,000.
Although evolutionarily unrelated to the dodo – which was closer to pigeons and doves – the parallels are hard to miss: ground-dwelling, blithely unafraid of people and trapped in a small, isolated habitat. The threats circling it are escalating fast.
Fire is the most acute risk. The Serra do Divisor’s ancient sandstone soils support forests that take millennia to form.
“A single burn could erase thousands of years of habitat growth – and the tinamou’s entire population,” Morais warned.
Then there are the human incursions creeping ever closer. A proposed highway linking Brazil and Peru, plus a trans-continental railway, could open the region to logging, settlement and mining.
Though the area includes Brazil’s fourth-largest national park, the government has previously considered weakening its protection to allow greater economic activity.
“All of this makes me think the species will not have an easy future,” Morais said. “We are working hard to ensure it is recognised before these policies advance any further.” At least some official monitoring is under way.
Diego Mendes, an environmental analyst at the Chico Mendes Institute for Conservation and Biodiversity (ICMBio), said the agency conducts continuous enforcement in the region. Those efforts helped reduce deforestation in the area by more than 11% in 2025, he said.
Morais’ team is preparing to meet ICMBio to determine the tinamou’s conservation status and map out next steps.
“Mitigation actions will be defined based on scientific evidence obtained in ongoing studies and the extinction risk assessment,” Mendes said in an email.
The species still requires detailed research into its distribution and ecology – the foundation, he added, for “defining mitigation and conservation actions”.
For now, the slaty-masked tinamou continues singing its mysterious, echoing arias through the valleys of the Serra do Divisor, utterly unaware of the danger. And that, Morais fears, is exactly the problem. — ©2025 The New York Times Company
This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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