Mr. Whitney said there was no officially protected forest and almost no intact native forest in the range of the pink-legged graveteiro.

The warbler-size bird, called the pink-legged graveteiro ("twig gatherer" in Portuguese), lives in towering forest trees that shade cocoa plantations in the coastal state of Bahia.

The pink-legged graveteiro belongs to the ovenbird family, a group of New World tropical birds with more than 230 species and found in virtually every kind of habitat, from cloud forests to deserts.

But the pink-legged graveteiro was found in a densely populated agricultural region, and Dr. Van Remsen of the university's Museum of Natural Science called it "the most exciting new species of bird discovered in decades."

The discovery of the pink-legged graveteiro (Acrobatornis fonsecai), whose genus is also new to science, was announced in the current issue of The Wilson Bulletin, an ornithological journal, by Mr. Whitney and his Brazilian colleagues.