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The slender-billed curlew is declared extinct
The slender-billed curlew was a species of wading bird last officially seen three decades ago.
Despite the occasional unsubstantiated reports since then, researchers have combed through all the available data and concluded that the bird is now extinct.
The slender-billed curlew was last officially seen in 1995.
Over the past 30 years there have been a trickle of reports of the migratory bird being seen across south and eastern Europe. It now seems likely that these were mistaken identities.
Researchers have gone through the account of every specimen, photograph and report for the slender-billed curlew since the late nineteenth century to figure out the probability that the bird survives to the present day. The result is that the curlew is likely extinct, making it the first mainland European bird to go extinct in half a millennium.
Dr Alex Bond is the Senior Curator in Charge of Birds at the Natural History Museum. He has been involved in tracing the fate of the curlew.
“When the slender-billed curlew stopped returning to their main wintering site at Merja Zerga, Morocco, there was quite a lot of effort put in to try and locate them on breeding grounds,” explains Alex. “Several expeditions, hundreds of thousands of square kilometres searched. And all this has turned up, unfortunately, is nothing.”
“They are extinct. And they probably went extinct very close to or very soon after 1995.”
The full assessment for the status of the slender-billed curlew has been published in Ibis.
The slender-billed curlew looked very similar to the Eurasian curlew, which has likely contributed to unconfrimed reports of the bird still surviving to this day.
The decline of the curlew
To the untrained eye, the slender-billed curlew could be easily confused with the more abundant Eurasian curlew. A brown and beige wading bird with a speckly belly, its most obvious defining characteristic was a flash of white under its tail typically only visible during flight.
But what made the slender-billed curlew most notable was its slightly unusual migratory route. Breeding on the steppes of Khazakstan and southern Russia, the birds would fly south-west. Passing through the Danube Delta, across the Balkans and southern Italy, most would eventually end up in northern Morocco where the curlews would spend the winter.
“A few other birds do this route,” says Alex. “But most of the birds that breed in that area will either go down the coast of India or through the Middle East and into East Africa. There’re not many other species that go south-west.”
It is thought that the birds made simple nests on the ground, laying up to four eggs each season. But very little else is known about the bird.
According to Alex, this is probably because the birds were “never terribly abundant”.
“The first nests were described in the early twentieth century by a Russian biologist named Ushakov,” explains Alex. “And even when he was looking for the birds, he described them as never common on the ground.”
The reasons for this are likely twofold. The first is that they were frequently hunted during their annual migration over Europe. Alex says the birds were commonly found for sale in markets of southern Europe, and specifically in Italy. This is how some museum specimens were obtained.
The extinction of the slender-billed curlew is likely due to a combination of factors, including hunting and habitat destruction.
The second reason was the rapid agricultural intensification in the Soviet Union in the mid twentieth century. The conversion of the grasslands and steppes of central Asia to grow arable crops likely destroyed many of the curlew’s remaining breeding grounds.
While the birds were previously well-recorded across Europe, including individuals spotted in France in the 1960s, this double blow meant that over the past century sightings dwindled. The last specimen was collected in 1981, and the last verified sighting in 1995. Since then, there have been a handful of reports but none of them have been backed up with solid evidence.
The new normal
Pulling together nearly 1,400 records, Alex and his colleagues determined what the highest level of evidence was in any given year. They concluded that a photograph taken in 1995 was most probably the last time anyone saw a live slender-billed curlew.
While Europe has not been immune to the wave of bird extinctions that have swept the world since the 1500s, those such as the great auk and Canary Island oystercatcher were largely island species. The slender-billed curlew, however, is the first mainland European species to go extinct during this time period.
Unfortunately, the curlew is unlikely to be the last casualty.
“As climate change continues, this is going to be the status quo,” says Alex. “This is going to be the new normal. And whether it’s the slender-billed curlew today, or something like the Nubian bustard in the Sahel, things are not getting better for birds.”
Tackling climate change, habitat destruction and pollution is the best chance we’ve got at protecting these birds and giving them the best chance in the future.
