14/11/2018
After
nearly 40 years without a confirmed sighting, Common
Buttonquail has become the first bird to be declared extinct in
Europe since Great Auk.
Better
known by European birders as Andalusian Hemipode, the species has
been officially classified as Extinct by the Ecological Transition of the
Spanish Government, with extensive searches in southern Spain during the last
two decades failing to unearth any remnant populations of this elusive
species. The last confirmed Spanish record was in 1981 near Doñana National
Park and while reliable observations – often of singing birds – were made
into the 2000s, none was fully accepted.
Unlike
Great Auk, Common Buttonquail is not globally extinct, and is in fact
widely distributed in Africa and Asia. It maintains a flimsy foothold in
the Western Palearctic, with a small and declining population of the nominate
subspecies sylvaticus found in traditional farmland in parts of
coastal Morocco. This population was undiscovered for decades, and only came to
public light in 2011 following a paper published in Dutch Birding. In Europe however,
Spain represented the last vestige for Common Buttonquail, with the only other
populations in Sicily and Portugal likely becoming extinct in the 1920s
and 1970s respectively.
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