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Over the Edge

One more bird becomes extinct on our watch

Bronwen Scott
5 min readDec 15, 2024
Painting of a noble if sad-looking bird with long legs, long neck and a long, slender, down-curved bill. The curlew has brown feathers on back and wings and black spots on neck and breast. It stands on one leg with the other slighly raised. It  is beside a clump of straggy grass with a water body and mountain in the background.
Slender-billed Curlew from ‘Birds of Europe, Volume 4’ (1837) by John Gould, illustration by Elizabeth Gould. Biodiversity Heritage Library. Public Domain.

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

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Bronwen Scott
Bronwen Scott

Written by Bronwen Scott

Zoologist, writer, artist, museum fan, enjoying life in the tropical rainforest of Far North Queensland. She/her. Website: bronwenscott.com

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