After almost 30 years without a substantiated sighting, researchers have concluded that the slender-billed curlew is extinct. It is the first mainland European bird to go extinct in the last 500 years. Link to an article by Josh Davis at the UK's National History Museum's website is here.
The slender-billed curlew was a small wading bird that bred in Russia and migrated to Mediterranean areas and parts of the Middle East. The last confirmed sighting of the species was in 1995 in Morocco.
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 [Dr. Alex Bond, the Senior Curator in Charge of Birds at the Natural History Museum]. "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."
Dr. Bond said that the extinction was probably the result of being hunted during their migration over Europe, and the destruction of the curlew's breeding grounds during mid-20th century Soviet Union agricultural expansion.
While a coalition of scientists from The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, BirdLife International, Naturalis Biodiversity Centre in the Netherlands and Natural History Museum determined that the slender-billed curlew is extinct, the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list, which makes the official determination of a species' extinction, has not yet done so, according to The Independent.
