CRYPTOZOOLOGY ONLINE: Still on the Track

Over, once again to the divine Ms F. Charming as usual, she is taking up cudgels on behalf of an obscure little wading bird that looks set to go extinct without anyone really noticing....

The thing I noticed quickly when researching about this little bird is that whilst most places described the Great Auk as the last European bird to become extinct when really it was the Canary Islands Oystercatcher in 1981. The Slender Billed Curlew (Numenius tenuirostrisis) in danger of joining this bird, with no one noticing and many people not caring.

Websites would probably still say it was the Great Auk that went most recently.

This Curlew is a bit of a mystery bird, its breeding grounds are still unknown although it is thought they are in Siberia somewhere, Siberia being a big place there is still hope that their breeding grounds are in a place humans have not yet taken over.

The other big mystery is why they are in such decline, of course the usual suspects of habitat loss, hunting and egg-collecting (the bane of such rare birds) apply, but these curlews were fairly common even in the 19th and early 20th century, into the 1970’s flocks of 100 birds were recorded. Perhaps one of their food sources have vanished, or maybe the dwindling gene pool had a catastrophic effect.

The curlew shares unfortunate characteristics with the Dodo, it is a plump bird and one which is not normally inclined to flee from humans, along with being tastier than the unlucky Dodo this means that hunters (even those who do not know what the bird is) find it an attractive target. One such hunter coming upon the hidden breeding grounds could wipe out a huge percentage of any remaining birds.

The thought of the slender billed curlew vanishing forever is a dreadful one, not least to those who have actually seen it. Simon Barnes in an article for The Times said – “It doesn't feel right. I really don't feel happy about the possibility that I have seen a bird that is now extinct. Well, it is not right that any one should, but since it's me that saw it, on a brief but rather dazzling trip, the whole thing has become oddly personal. I feel almost guilty: as if I shouldn't have seen it, as if my viewing of it somehow contributed to its downfall.”

Seeing a species that may become or may already be extinct brings home the reality that once the last one has gone there will never be another. And that the disappearance of even this one little wading bird is as much a tragedy as the death of the last Great Auk

Wikipedia Factfile: The Slender-billed Curlew, Numenius tenuirostris, is a critically endangered bird in the wader family Scolopacidae. It breeds in marshes and peat bogs in the taiga of Siberia, and is migratory, formerly wintering in shallow freshwater habitats around the Mediterranean.
This species has occurred as a vagrant in western Europe, the Canary Islands, the Azores, Oman, Canada and Japan. The only time it was seen in North America was in Crescent Beach, Ontario, Canada in 1925.