Meet Indonesia’s new honeyeater species from Rote Island

• A new bird species from Indonesia has been described by a group of scientists after it was first observed in 1990, a paper said.
• The bird, which belongs to the honeyeater family, has been named after Indonesia’s first lady, Iriana Joko Widodo, as a way to promote the protection of the species.
• The researchers said the newly described species’ population was primarily threatened by deforestation to clear land for residential and agricultural use.

Scientists have described a new species of bird found only on the island of Rote in eastern Indonesia — but already the population of the honey-eating fowl is threatened by habitat loss as a result of rapid deforestation.

The discovery of Myzomela irianawidodoae — named after Indonesia’s first lady, Iriana Joko Widodo — involved a series of separate field studies between 1990 and 2015 by different groups of researchers, according to a paper published Dec. 31, 2017, in the scientific journal Treubia.

The first observation of a Myzomela species on Rote in East Nusa Tenggara province — one of the many islands that comprise the Lesser Sunda Islands — =read more