Scientists on November 18, 2024, announced that the Slender-billed Curlew, a migratory shorebird that once bred in western Siberia and wintered around the Mediterranean, could have become extinct.
The reasons for the extinction are not clear. But the paper brought out by the RSPB, BirdLife International, Naturalis Biodiversity Center and the Natural History Museum hinted at possible pressures including “extensive drainage of their raised bog breeding grounds for agricultural use, the loss of coastal wetlands used for winter feeding, and hunting, especially latterly, of an already reduced, fragmented and declining population”.
“There could have been impacts from pollution, disease, predation, and climate change, but the scale of these impacts is unknown,” a statement by BirdLife International noted.
The curlew was last unequivocally seen in north Morocco in 1995.
Alex Bond, Senior Curator in Charge of Birds at the Natural History Museum, explained that ornithologists put in a lot of effort when the curlew stopped returning to its main wintering site at Merja Zerga, Morocco.
“…there was quite a lot of effort put in to try to locate them on breeding grounds. Several expeditions, hundreds of thousands of square kilometres searched. And all this has turned up, unfortunately, is nothing,” Bond was quoted by the BirdLife statement.
He added that bird extinction would be the status quo as climate change continued. “Things are not getting better for birds. Tackling climate change, habitat destruction and pollution is the best chance we’ve got at protecting them, at home and abroad.”
The statement noted that the extinction of the curlew is the first known global bird extinction from mainland Europe, North Africa and West Asia.
The news of the curlew’s extinction comes even as 16 other migratory shorebird species have just been uplisted to higher threat categories on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species, owing to population declines.
The IUCN Red List currently recognises 164 birds to have become extinct since 1500, from more than 11,000 species that have had their conservation status assessed by BirdLife International.