Yorker News - Wakatobi flowerpecker, a new bird species from Sulawesi belongs to Dicaeum, a genus in the flowerpecker family Dicaeidae confirmed 15 years after first observation.

Dicaeum flowerpeckers are small (10 to 18 cm long), often colorful birds.

Ding Li Yong, a PhD student at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University (ANU), helped to confirm the new species, known as the Sulawesi Streaked Flycatcher.

"The locals knew we were there for a biological expedition and so a hunter came to us with some dead birds," Yong said on Tuesday. "We obtained these specimens and one was this new species."

"We instantly knew that it couldn't be anything else."

Dicaeum flowerpeckers have short tails, short thick curved bills and tubular tongues.

During the months of July, August and September in various years between 1999 and 2012, Dr Nicola Marples of Trinity College and his colleagues sampled individuals of a previously recognized Dicaeum species – the Grey-sided flowerpecker (Dicaeum celebicum) – from seven sites across the Wakatobi archipelago, Buton Island and the south-eastern peninsula of Sulawesi. In total, 58 flowerpeckers were mist-netted and studied.

The combined results from genetic, phylogenetic and morphological analyses indicated that flowerpeckers from a small chain of islands known as the Wakatobi Islands are a new species, named the Wakatobi flowerpecker (Dicaeum kuehni).

The genetic data also revealed that the Grey-sided flowerpecker and the Wakatobi flowerpecker did not mix or interbreed, which in turn suggests that they do not cross the 27 km stretch of ocean between them.