Nina Foster / 31 Mar 2025 / Vilcabamba Inca
While looking for one lost bird, Carole Turek learned of another. She had traveled to Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in spring 2024, hoping to photograph the elusive Santa Marta Sabrewing (Campylopterus phainopeplus). The critically endangered species was lost to science until its rediscovery in 2022. With the help of American Bird Conservancy’s (ABC’s) local partners, Turek was delighted to find and film the rare sabrewing — one step closer to her goal of photographing every hummingbird species in the world.
John Mittermeier, director of the Search for Lost Birds at ABC, and Dan Lebbin, ABC’s Vice President of Threatened Species, were part of the team that joined Turek on the trip. Upon discovering her ambitious quest, they asked if she had heard of the Vilcabamba Inca (Coeligena eisenmanni). The bird was first described by Dr. John Weske in 1985 based on specimens collected in 1967. Restricted to the Vilcabamba mountains of south-central Peru, the lost species had not been documented for 57 years.
Turek was up for the challenge. With plans to visit Peru later that summer with William Orellana, a birding guide and photographer who accompanies Turek on every expedition, she added four days in the Vilcabamba region to the itinerary. In August 2024, they captured the first-ever photographs and video of the Vilcabamba Inca in the wild.
A Lucky Morning in the Mountains
On the first of four days in the Vilcabamba district, Turek and Orellana, together with guides Baldomero Vazquez of Turismo Nor Perú and Marcelo Quipo, left their lodge in Pucyura long before sunrise. They ventured into the mountains, where the Vilcabamba Inca inhabits cloud forest between 1600 and 3000 meters of elevation. Turek chose a specific destination based on where eBird users had previously spotted the lost hummingbird. Their reports included GPS coordinates but lacked photos, videos, or audio recordings of the species.
After several hours of driving up rough mountain roads, the team arrived at the site. They set up cameras in front of tubular orange flowers and, expecting a long wait, sat down for some breakfast. Everyone had just started to eat when Quipo looked up and said, “I think that’s the bird!”
There it was, drinking from the nectar-filled flowers: a large, straight-billed hummingbird with a dark green body, black head, white pectoral band, mostly white tail, and coppery upper tail coverts.
“I heard a hummingbird, and I was sure it was a Vilcabamba Inca because I had never heard any sound like it,” Quipo recalls. “It was a moment of joy. I couldn’t believe it. I knew how important it was to find this species that was missing for years.”
“We dropped everything and ran for the cameras,” Turek remembers. “William got a four-second video, I got about 15-20 pictures, and that was it. The bird flew away.”
The team waited all day to see if the hummingbird would return. They revisited the site the following morning, and the next, hoping to take more photographs. But the bird didn’t show.
“We were stunned that we found it so fast. We were so excited, but not as excited as we should have been,” Turek says. The group didn’t realize that their first glimpse of the Vilcabamba Inca would also be their last. “Maybe we frightened it by jumping up and taking pictures,” she adds.
Although Turek spent less time with the Vilcabamba Inca than she had hoped, she still managed to capture definitive proof of the bird’s existence. After almost 60 years, the lost hummingbird species had been found.
Turek shared a video of the expedition with more than 125,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel, Hummingbird Spot. Using visual media to highlight lost and lesser-known birds is a valuable tool for connecting new audiences with species in need of attention.
“Most people won’t have the chance to visit the Vilcabamba area,” says Dustin Chen, a wildlife photographer focused on endemic birds in remote parts of the world. “Good-quality photos present the beauty of those birds and make us feel that they are valuable and should be protected. Awareness is always the center of conservation work.”
Looking Forward
The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species classified the Vilcabamba Inca as Least Concern in 2016. According to the IUCN's criteria, there were not enough data to deem the species Vulnerable or Endangered. The population size of the Vilcabamba Inca is unknown; however, given the ongoing destruction, degradation, and fragmentation of Andean cloud forests, experts suspect that the species is in decline. The Vilcabamba mountains have faced fewer ecological disturbances than other bird habitats in Peru, but mining and agricultural development are slowly encroaching on the area.
Hopefully, the 2024 observation of the Vilcabamba Inca will encourage birders to look for and document the species and help provide researchers the necessary data to quantify its population size and trends. Further research could also settle the debate between taxonomists as to whether the bird is a distinct species. Many taxonomies maintain Weske’s 1985 classification of the hummingbird as a subspecies of the widespread Collared Inca (Coeligena torquata). Others recognize the Vilcabamba Inca as a separate species on account of its unique geographic distribution and coppery upper tail coverts. DNA analyses of museum specimens and surveys of the bird in the wild may resolve these disagreements.
Rediscoveries of lost and elusive species like the Vilcabamba Inca, coupled with subsequent research, expand our understanding of bird diversity in ecosystems across the globe. New observations inform the work of local conservationists and build additional support for their efforts.
“Documenting the continued survival of lost birds, as Carole Turek and William Orellana have done with the Vilcabamba Inca, is an important contribution to our understanding of these species — and can set in motion action to protect these species and others that co-occur in the same habitats” says Lebbin.
“It increases interest in the area that we want to protect, and gives us visibility around the world,” says Constantino Aucca Chutas, president of Asociación Ecosistemas Andinos (ECOAN), an ABC partner. Far to the north of the Vilcabamba Inca’s habitat, ECOAN worked with ABC to establish the Abra Patricia Reserve in 2005. The reserve now protects more than 25,000 acres of the Andes, including the habitat of the critically endangered, once-lost Long-whiskered Owlet. Aucca continues, “We have the passion, we have the people, and we have the spirit to continue doing more and more to protect birds in Peru.”
Nina Foster is a science communication specialist with interests in ornithology, forest ecology, and sustainable agriculture. She holds a BA in English literature with a minor in integrative biology from Harvard University and is currently the Post-baccalaureate Fellow in Plant Humanities at Dumbarton Oaks.