The slender-billed curlew is no more and the birding world is in mourning. The curlew has just been officially declared extinct – the first known global bird extinction from mainland Europe, North Africa and West Asia.
Although this curlew species has an historic distribution far from Australia, its demise has sent a shudder through the birding community here. Australian birders here see it as a portent for the uncertain future of the eastern curlew. This bird, which breeds in the far north of Asia and spends summer in Australia, has been declared critically endangered by the Australian government in recent years.
The curlews are distinguished by their large size and long, curving bills. Of the world’s nine species, two are now officially extinct, the slender-billed following the Eskimo curlew which vanished 60 years ago.
The curlew clan represents a group of birds – waders – which are the most threatened on earth. According to Birdlife International, the demise of the slender-billed curlew follows the recent announcement that 16 other migratory shorebird species have been uplisted to higher threat categories on the global Red List of Threatened Species.
The causes of the slender-billed curlew’s decline may never be fully understood, but possible pressures included extensive drainage of their breeding grounds in bogs 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 also have been impacts from pollution, disease, and climate change.
The eastern curlew faces the same threat. On its non-breeding grounds in Australasia it once flew in the tens of thousands but birders are lucky these days to see a handful of birds. On the mudflats of Orielton Lagoon near Sorell it was once shot for the pot.
A scientist with Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Nicola Crockford, said the migratory behaviour of the waders created problems for them in the modern world. The birds literally connected nations.
“Efforts by some countries to conserve a species can be undermined by damaging actions in other countries which share the same migratory birds,” she said. “Just as carbon in the atmosphere is a measure of international efforts to combat climate change, the status of migratory species is an indicator of the success of international efforts to conserve biodiversity.
“The extinction of the slender-billed curlew is as much a clarion call for greatly enhanced action for nature as the floods, fires and droughts devastating the planet attributed to climate change.”
The migratory shorebirds visiting Australia travel along what is known as the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, which crosses some of the most densely populated regions on earth. Extending from Arctic Russia and Alaska in the far north to Tasmania and New Zealand at its southern limit, it encompasses 21 nations, most hungry for land.