The first comprehensive list of birds that haven’t been seen or heard in more than a decade, reported by citizen scientists, has been released by scientists.
The first comprehensive list of birds that haven’t been seen or heard in more than a decade has been released by a group of scientists, drawing on a wealth of citizen scientist sightings, photographs, video and audio recordings reported to the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
The Macaulay Library is the world’s largest archive of animal media. It includes more than 33 million photographs, 1.2 million audio recordings, and over two hundred thousand videos covering 96% of the world’s bird species. It also hosts rapidly growing numbers of insect, fish, frog, and mammal recordings.
“We started with the Macaulay Library because it is the richest depository of bird media, and we quickly found documentation for the vast majority of the world’s birds,” said the study’s lead author, Cameron Rutt, a bird biologist with the American Bird Conservancy at the time of the research, an Adjunct Professor at Louisiana State University and self-described “top-notch bird-bum” (read: freelance field biologist).
“We also used data from iNaturalist and xeno-canto. We looked for species not represented at all with a recent image, video, or sound recording,” Dr Rutt explained. “A species would be considered ‘lost’ to science if there was no media of the bird within the past 10 years or more.”
iNaturalist is a social network for sharing biodiversity information to help the public learn about nature, and xeno-canto, which translates to “strange sound”, is a website and collaborative project dedicated to sharing and identifying wildlife sounds from all over the world.
The List of Lost Birds was generated on behalf of the Search for Lost Birds project at the American Bird Conservancy.
To create the list of lost birds, the study’s authors collated 42 million photographs, videos and audio records — with more than 33 million of these provided by the Macaulay Library alone. Out of all the records, 144 species — 1.2% of all known bird species — qualified as lost. (Eight of these lost species are parrots.)
Weirdly, these lost birds have been classified from ‘Least Concern’ to ‘Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct)’. The only classification in this scheme that makes any real sense is ‘Data Deficient.’ I was surprised to see that the ivory-billed woodpecker is listed as ‘Critically Endangered’, and that the eskimo curlew and imperial woodpecker are listed as ‘Critically Endangered (Possibly Extinct)’. All of these unfortunate bird species are almost certainly extinct.
“One of the things I learned from doing this is how many whimbrel and curlew relatives have likely gone extinct or seem to be heading in that direction,” said the study’s co-author, natural historian Eliot Miller, who was a postdoctoral researcher at the Cornell Lab when this study was in progress. “It seems to be a group of birds that does not do well with people.”
However, since this list of lost birds was published, there have been a few remarkable rediscoveries, including the incredibly elusive black-naped pheasant-pigeon, which hadn’t been seen or heard in 140 years. Despite its rediscovery, this handsome terrestrial pigeon almost certainly the most endangered bird in New Guinea.
Most of the undocumented species are native to parts of Asia, Africa and throughout the scattered islands of Oceania. In some cases, species may be considered lost because their habitat is so remote that nobody has returned since the initial sightings. (this almost certainly is the case for some of the lost parrots of Oceania.) Unsurprisingly, six lost species are native to Hawaii, which is the hotbed of avian extinctions in the United States.
What were the goals of this study?
“We had several goals in mind here,” Dr Miller elaborated. “We wanted to see if well-vetted public media databases would be comprehensive and trustworthy enough to document the presence or absence of species. Once absent species are identified, we can look for them and see if they need some kind of protection — this method helps identify research priorities for possible conservation action.”
Further, a vital aspect of the project is accessing and reporting local knowledge with on-site partners and helping fund expeditions to find these lost birds and assess their conservation needs. This knowledge will be crucial to the success of efforts to find species such as the Himalayan quail (known from only two locations in the western Himalayas in Uttarakhand, north-west India and last reported in 1876), Itombwe nightjar (a nocturnal species from mid-elevation humid forest in the Itombwe Mountains of eastern Congo), Jerdon’s courser (a nocturnal bird endemic to India) or the Bates’s weaver (endemic to Cameroon, and is often regarded as inexplicably rare across its distribution).
“A narrow slice of the world’s birds has fallen through the cracks,” Dr Rutt summarized. “The coming years and decades will be critical if these birds are going to persist.”
Source:
Cameron L Rutt, Eliot T Miller, Alex J Berryman, Roger J Safford, Christina Biggs, and John C Mittermeier (2024). Global gaps in citizen-science data reveal the world’s “lost” birds, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 22(7):e2778 | doi:10.1002/fee.2778
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