An international research team including Japan’s Yamashina Institute for Ornithology said Wednesday that it has discovered a new bird species in the Tokara Islands of Kagoshima Prefecture.
The new bird, named the Tokara leaf warbler, or Phylloscopus tokaraensis, is the first bird species to be given a scientific name in Japan since 1981, when the Okinawa rail was named Gallirallus okinawae.
The team, which also included researchers from Japan’s Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, found that the Tokara leaf warbler is genetically and morphologically distinct from the Iijima’s leaf warbler, which has long been considered the same species.