Field-based reporting on the rarest birds of the world's tropical belts, from Neotropical cloud forests to Southeast Asian lowland rainforests.
Few birds are more mythologised than the Resplendent Quetzal. Behind the iridescence is a highly specialised cloud-forest species that depends on a single tree family to survive.
Vivid, secretive and easier to hear than to see, the Golden Pheasant is one of the most photographed and least understood birds native to central China.
Only two islands on Earth host Wilson's Bird-of-Paradise. Its neon head and choreographed display have made it a bucket-list species — with real access consequences.
The Victoria Crowned Pigeon is the largest pigeon on Earth and carries a lace-like blue crest that looks designed rather than evolved.
The Hyacinth Macaw is the world's largest flying parrot and one of conservation's more hopeful stories — a species pulled back from the brink of collapse by a single, focused Brazilian project.
The male Long-wattled Umbrellabird looks less like a cotinga than an eccentric priest — jet black, with a pompadour crest and a feathered wattle that hangs a third of a metre from his throat.
The Marvelous Spatuletail carries two long tail rackets it whips in front of its body. It lives in one narrow valley in northern Peru.
The Imperial Amazon appears on the flag of Dominica. After Hurricane Maria, fewer than 250 are thought to remain in the wild.
The Sumatran Ground Cuckoo went a century without being recorded. Even today, only a handful of photographs of a live bird exist.
The Hoatzin looks like a prehistoric survivor: it eats leaves, ferments them like a cow, and its chicks are born with claws on their wings.
The Andean Cock-of-the-Rock is a flame-orange, disc-crested cloud-forest bird whose dawn dance-offs are one of South America's great wildlife shows.
The King of Saxony Bird-of-Paradise wears two extraordinary head plumes so strange that early scientists refused to believe they were real.
The Bornean Bristlehead is the only species in its family — a black, bald-headed rainforest bird that few birders ever see well.
A crow-sized bird-of-paradise trailing white tail streamers three times its body length through the mossy highlands of Papua New Guinea.