Birdwatching

The Convention on Migratory Species and other parners have launched a last push to find one of the world's rarest birds.


They have issued a call to search for and find any remaining populations of SLENDER BILLED CURLEW-NUMENLUS TENUIROSTRIS.
This announcement was made at the Ninth Meeting of The Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Migratory Species, in Rome, Italy.


Classified as Critically Endangered, Slender Billed Curlew is the rarest species found in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, with no confirmed records since 1999. Regarded as very common in the 19th century, it declined dramatically during the 20th.
It migrated from its presumed breeding grounds in Siberia, across central and eastern Europe to wintering grounds in North Africa and the Middle East.

Flocks of over 100 birfs were recorded from Morocco as late as the 1960s and 1970s. However, between 1980 and 1990, there were only 103 records, and from 1990-1999, this dropped to 74, with most recent verified records being of one to three birds.

However, the Slender billed Curlew is easily overlooked, challenging to identify and may use countries, such as Iraq and Iran, that have been relatively inaccessible to experienced birders in recent years.

Although the situation for Slender billed Curlew does look gloomy, the fact that other species have risen from the dead recently does fuel our optimism.

Encouraging people not to give up on this bird. Additionally, this bird was kown to inhabit remote aera, so it is just possible that small numbers of the bird may still be wintering in an isolated part of North Africa or the Middle East, or that soome unknown nesting site may be discovered in the depths of Central Asia, but our quest is definitely a race against time....
This is the last chance to find Slender billed Curlew. If we lose this species, it will be the first extinction of a European bird since Canary Islands Oystercatcher-Haematopus meadewaldoi in 1981.