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Over the Edge
One more bird becomes extinct on our watch
The Slender-billed Curlew (Numenius tenuirostris) is listed as critically endangered. But on the balance of probabilities, it is extinct.
The last indisputable record is from February 1995 at Merja Zerga, a coastal wetland about halfway between Rabat and Tangier in Morocco. There have been a few sightings since then, but none confirmed. If the species still survives, it numbers no more than 50 individuals. If it has a future, that future is bleak.
It takes a long time to declare a species extinct. Absence of evidence, as we like to trot out in support of all sorts of things, is not evidence of absence. Yes, it’s true — but it can also be unhelpful. At some point, we have to make the call that a species has become extinct, and acknowledge that it’s disappeared on our watch.
‘Become extinct’ is the sort of hands off, it just happened, it was like that when I got here language that is easy to slip into. The Slender-billed Curlew didn’t go extinct by accident; it was driven to extinction by human activity. Its breeding grounds were the moorland and bogs of northern Kazakhstan and south-western Siberia, areas now drained and diced into wheat paddocks. The migration pattern crossed more longitude than latitude. It wintered in Europe and North Africa, and was the commonest curlew…