Armed only with a song, two naturalists flushed what may be the world’s rarest bird on the steep slopes of the Himalayas, a species never before seen alive in the wild. The sighting of the secretive stub-tailed creature, known formally as the rusty-throated wren-babbler, was disclosed Saturday by the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Benjamin King, a museum ornithologist, and Julian Donahue, a retired curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, identified the bird during a November expedition into the Mishmi Hills in Arunachal Pradesh in India, at an altitude of about 8,000 feet. They lured it into the open by playing a tape recording of bird calls, Donahue said.‘‘It was flying low behind bushes and in the brush. We could hear it, and we could see glimpses of it. It took an hour of chasing this elusive bird before we could see enough to convince ourselves,’’ Donahue said. The only previous evidence of the species had been a dead bird found in 1947 during an expedition led by S. Dillon Ripley, head of the Smithsonian Institution. —LAt-WP
