Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Miracle



I believe in miracles, and the miraculous news today is that an entirely new bird species has been confirmed in India. This from the New York Times:
"The multicolored bird, Liocichla bugunorum, was first sighted in May in the remote Eaglenest Wildlife Sanctuary in Arunachal Pradesh, a northeastern state near the border with China, by Ramana Athreya, an astronomer as well as amateur ornithologist."

Mr Athreya says that he first saw the bird in 1995. This makes me wonder where Liocichla had been hiding before then. Is it possible that a new bird just gets created one day? Is this just Darwinian evolution and some freak mutation has taken affect to differentiate this ornithological wonder from whatever it evolved from? Or what if this multi-colored little beauty has been flying around, un-named and undifferentiated for 1000's of years and now that a human has managed to sight, capture and document the thing, it now actually exists in a manner that it did not before it's labeling?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Connie

Our miraculous world has many surprises, including newly discovered species. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/sci_nat_papua0s_0lost_world0_/html/1.stm