More than two decades after it was first spotted, a brightly colored Peruvian songbird has finally gotten a proper name.
Ornithologists from Louisiana State University first spotted what would be called the Inti Tanager in southeastern Peru's Manu National Park in October 2000.
With its bright yellow feathers and distinctive black stripe, the bird's plumage was reminiscent of Uma Thurman's iconic track suit in Kill Bill: Volume One, and soon it earned the nickname the 'Kill Bill Tanager.'
But it took more than a decade for researchers to find more specimens and start long the process of mapping the bird's family tree.
Eventually they realized it wasn't just a whole new species, but a new genus, as well.
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First spotted in 2000, the Inti Tanager earned the nickname 'the Kill Bill Tanager' because its distinctive yellow-and-black plumage is reminiscent of Uma Thurman's outfit in the 2003 movie Kill Bill
Daniel Lane, an ornithologist at LSU's Museum of Natural Science, heard the little chirper's song while leading a birdwatching tour on Peru's Manu-Kosñipata Road, a popular birding location.
He was quite familiar with the local avian inhabitants, so he assumed it was one of the more common birds in the area.
However, when he and fellow ornithologist Gary Rosenberg saw it through a telescope, they realized it was something new: a canary-yellow songbird with a pink bill, a bushy crest and a distinctive black stripe on its head.
'My first wild impression was it looked like an Old World oriole, something like a Black-naped Oriole from Asia,' Lane told the Audubon Society. 'Since that was obviously impossible, my next thought was that it must be a tanager.'
Ornithologist Daniel Lane's earliest sketch of an Inti Tanager, which migrates annual between Bolivia and Peru
Unfortunately, after just a glimpse, the bird flew off out of sight.
It wasn't until three years later, when Lane and Rosenberg were leading another birding tour in the region, that they saw the tanager again.
Lane finally collected a specimen in 2004 — but with just one bird, he couldn't determine its exact taxonomy.
Finally in December 2011, Frank Rheindt, then a graduate researcher at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, encountered a healthy breeding population in the foothills of Bolivia's remote Machariapo valley, some 200 miles away from where Lane had seen the tanager in Peru.
Other ornithologists had actually visited
