Togo Yellow-billed Barbet

The Togo Yellow-billed Barbet occurs in West Africa from eastern Ghana through Togo and Benin to western Nigeria. Despite being regularly detected in the correct habitat, there were apparently no documented records of this species between April 2011, when a bird was sound recorded in western Togo, and January 2022, when one was photographed in eastern Ghana.

The species is listed as Least Concern by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Togo Yellow-billed Barbets are apparently relatively common in parts of their range and the species is regularly detected in southwestern Nigeria by the Nigerian Bird Atlas. There are also published observations of the species from two locations in Togo in 2016 (Dowsett-Lemaire & Dowsett, 2019). Nevertheless, the species seems to be rarely documented and there were apparently no photo or audio documented records between April 2011, when a recording was made in western Togo by Françoise Dowsett-Lemaire, and January 2022 when a bird was photographed in eastern Ghana by Don MacGillivray of Birding Africa. Since then, there have been a number of other documented records of Togo Yellow-billed Barbets (for example, in December 2023 by Jan Ebr & Ivana Ebrová in iNaturalist).

The BirdLife International/Handbook of the Birds of the World global bird taxonomy considers Togo Yellow-billed Barbet to be a distinct species, while the eBird/Clements taxonomy lumps Togo Yelllow-billed Barbet together with Eastern and Western Yellow-billed Barbets into a single, widespread species: Yellow-billed Barbet Trachyphonus purpuratus.