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Introduction
Located at the south-eastern margin of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau the Northern Mountain Forests of Myanmar are located at the crossroads of three major biodiversity hotspots: the Himalayan hotspot, the Indo-Burma hotspot and the Southwestern Chinese Mountain hotspot (Marchese 2015). Therefore, the Northern Mountain Forests of Myanmar harbour highly diverse assemblages of faunal elements from two larger zoogeographic regions, the Palearctic and the Oriental (Indo-Malayan) region. Along the elevational gradient, local species assemblages occupy different ecological niches in a great number of different terrestrial ecoregions (Wikramanayake et al.2002). At 5,881 m above sea level, Myanmar’s highest mountain Hkakabo Razi is located in the centre of the third largest of 55 important bird areas (IBA) in Myanmar (country profile of Myanmar; Chan 2004). At a larger spatial scale, the Hkakabo Razi region is part of the Eastern Himalaya Endemic Bird Area (EBA 130) (Stattersfield et al.2005). A first assessment of avian species richness at Hkakabo Razi was conducted by Rappole et al. (2011): A long-term study over five expeditions listed no less than 431 bird species in this region. In the course of long-term monitoring this number has been raised to 441 bird species observed at Hkakabo Razi (Renner et al.2015). An independent study covering four annual surveys (2015–2017) in the Putao region (Zhang et al.2017) recorded a total number of 319 bird species and confirmed a mid-domain effect of species richness with highest diversity at average elevations (Stevens 1992, Acharya et al.2011).
The Northern Mountain Forests of Myanmar are also home to a number of globally threatened vertebrate species; mammals: the recently described Myanmar snub-nosed monkey Rhinopithecus strykeri (Geissmann et al.2011) and two endemic deer species of the genus Muntiacus (Rabinowitz et al.1999); birds: the critically endangered White-billed Heron Ardea insignis (Renner et al.2015), or the Rusty-bellied Shortwing (Brachypteryx hyperythra; compare species factsheet BirdLife International (2018). Brachypteryx hyperythra is fairly common at Hkakabo Razi, thus except for some fragmented and small populations in Nepal and north-east India, the Northern Mountain Forests of Myanmar are among the last refuges for this species. Among Myanmar’s endemic birds (see list at http://lntreasures.com/burma.html) most are typical lowland species and distributed farther south, such as the recently rediscovered Jerdon’s Babbler