page_title: Pamela C. Rasmussen
section_title: Asian birds
hierarchical_section_title: Pamela C. Rasmussen / Early life and career / Research highlights / Asian birds
caption_attribution_description: English: en:Forest Owlet from The Scientific Results of the Second Yarkand Mission, 1891 Until recently, the best illustration of the Forest Owlet was this one, which appeared in The Scientific Results of the Second Yarkard Mission, published in 1891. The illustration has several inaccuracies: the cheek patches are too dark and the breast is too barred; the belly, lower flanks, and undertail coverts should be completely white, not marked; the bands in the wing should be whiter; and the bill should be larger.
context_page_description: Pamela Cecile Rasmussen is a prominent American ornithologist and expert on Asian birds. She was formerly a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and is based at the Michigan State University. She is associated with other major centers of research in the United States and the United Kingdom.
  Rasmussen's early research investigated South American seabirds and fossil birds from North America. She later specialised in Asian birds describing several new species and clarifying the status of others, particularly white-eyes and owls. More recently, she has been involved in large scale collaborations looking at patterns of global biodiversity, and has assessed the taxonomic status of South Asian vultures.
  She was the main author of Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide, a landmark publication due to its greater geographical and species coverage compared to its predecessors. As a result of her study of museum bird specimens when researching for the book, she was instrumental in unveiling the extent of the theft from museums and fraudulent documentation perpetrated by eminent British ornithologist Richard Meinertzhagen.
context_section_description: Rasmussen described four new Asian bird species from her study of museum specimens. The Nicobar scops owl Otus alius, the Sangihe scops owl Otus collari, and the cinnabar hawk owl Ninox ios, a Sulawesi endemic,
  all in 1998, and the Taiwan bush-warbler Bradypterus alishanensis in 2000. She rediscovered the forest owlet Athene blewitti, which had not been seen since 1884, in western India, previous searches by S. Dillon Ripley, Salim Ali and others having failed because they relied on fake documentation from Richard Meinertzhagen. In November 1997, Rasmussen and Ben King of the American Museum of Natural History spent ten days unsuccessfully searching two east Indian locations before driving west to the site of another old specimen, where King spotted a small, chunky owl with short, heavily white-feathered legs and huge claws, which Rasmussen confirmed as the target species whilst the owl was videotaped and photographed.
  With her colleagues, she clarified the taxonomy of Indonesian white-eyes, establishing the specific status of the Sangihe white-eye Zosterops nehrkorni and the Seram white-eye Z. stalkeri and confirmed the identity of the Serendib scops owl which had originally been discovered in Sri Lanka by local ornithologist Deepal Warakagoda.
  The imperial pheasant is a rare bird found in the forests of Vietnam and Laos. Rasmussen and her co-workers used morphology, hybridisation experiments, and DNA analysis to show that this pheasant, previously thought critically endangered, is actually a naturally occurring hybrid between the Vietnamese pheasant Lophura hatinhensis and the subspecies annamensis of the silver pheasant L. nycthemera.
  A 2008 paper saw a return to white-eye taxonomy with the formal description of the Togian white-eye Zosterops somadikartai, an endemic species of the Togian Islands of Indonesia, which, unlike most of its relatives, lacks the white ring around the eye which give this group of birds its name. Rasmussen noted that the Togian white-eye is distinctive not only in its appearance, but also in its lilting song, which sounds higher pitched and is less varied in frequency than the songs of its close relatives.
  Pamela Rasmussen's interest in Asian birds led to her involvement in more specifically conservation-directed projects. Two Gyps vultures, the Indian white-rumped vulture, Gyps bengalensis, and the "long-billed vulture" suffered a 99 percent population decrease in South Asia due to poisoning by diclofenac, a veterinary drug that causes kidney failure in birds that have eaten the carcasses of treated cattle. Rasmussen showed that there are two distinct species of long-billed vulture: the Indian vulture G. indicus and slender-billed vulture G. tenuirostris. This is important to conservation, since a captive-breeding program has been established to assist the recovery of at-risk vulture species.
caption: An 1891 painting of the forest owlet, which was rediscovered by Rasmussen in 1997
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