First European bird extinction for 170 years

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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Museum collection reveals distribution of Carolina parakeet 100 years after its extinction

Date:  June 19, 2018

Source:  Pensoft Publishers

Summary:

While 2018 marks the centenary of the death of the last captive Carolina parakeet -- North America's only native parrot, a team of researchers have shed new light on the previously known geographical range of the species, which was officially declared extinct in 1920.

Combining observations and specimen data, the new Carolina parakeet occurrence dataset, recently published in the open access Biodiversity Data Journal by Dr Kevin Burgio, , Dr Colin Carlson, University of Maryland and Georgetown University, and Dr Alexander Bond, Natural History Museum of London, is the most comprehensive ever produced.

The new study provides unprecedented information on the birds range providing a window into the past ecology of a lost species.

"Making these data freely available to other researchers will hopefully help unlock the mysteries surrounding the extinction and ecology of this iconic species. Parrots are the most at-risk group of birds and anything we can learn about past extinctions may be useful going forward," says the study's lead author, Kevin Burgio.

The observational recordings included in the study have been gleaned from a wide variety of sources, including the correspondence of well-known historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson and the explorers Lewis and Clark.

The study team referenced recorded sightings spanning nearly 400 years. The oldest recorded sighting dates back to 1564, and was found in a description of the current state of Florida written by Rene Laudonniere in 1602.

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New bird that humans drove to extinction discovered in Azores

Date: July 26, 2017

Source: SINC

Summary: Inside the crater of a volcano on Graciosa Island in the Azores archipelago, in the Atlantic Ocean, an international team of researchers has discovered the bones of a new extinct species of songbird, a bullfinch which they have named Pyrrhula crassa. The remains were found in a small cavity through which time ago the lava flowed. This bird disappeared a few hundreds of years ago due to human colonization of the islands and the introduction of invasive species.

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Which extinct ducks could fly?

Date: June 7, 2017

Source: American Ornithological Society Publications Office

We're all familiar with flightless birds: ostriches, emus, penguins -- and ducks? Ducks and geese, part of a bird family called the anatids, have been especially prone to becoming flightless over the course of evolutionary history. However, it can be difficult to determine from fossils whether an extinct anatid species could fly or not. A new study from The Auk: Ornithological Advances takes a fresh approach, classifying species as flightless or not based on how far their skeletal proportions deviate from the expected anatomy of a flying bird and offering a glimpse into the lives of these extinct waterfowl.

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Black-Throated Finch Extinct in New South Wales

A few of these rare birds still exist in neighboring Queensland, but planned coal mines could push them over the edge

By John R. Platt on April 28, 2016

Australia’s bird-lovers just got some bad news. The New South Wales Scientific Committee has identified the southern black-throated finch (Poephila cincta cincta) as a likely extinction within the state. The tiny, 15-gram bird hasn’t been seen in NSW since 1994. Its disappearance has been blamed on a mix of habitat loss, invasive plants, altered fire regimes, agriculture, mining and invasive rabbits.

We don’t need to completely mourn this bird yet, as it still barely holds on outside of NSW. “The subspecies does still occur in limited numbers in the far north of its range in Queensland so it is not entirely extinct,” reports Mark Eldridge, chair of the NSW Scientific Committee, “but it is not doing well.”

That might be an understatement. Agriculture has already reduced black-throated finch habitat in Queensland by at least 80 percent, and it’s about to shrink even more. Six coal mines planned for central Queensland could wipe out half of the bird’s remaining habitat, according to a paper published earlier this year in PLOS One. Habitats affected by the mines’ construction would include some of the primary grasslands the birds need as ground-based seed eaters. Conservationists hope to use the rare birds to block the mines, but so far there hasn’t been much progress.

Looking elsewhere, the northern subspecies of black-throated finch (P.c. atropygialis) appears to doing quite well is not currently considered to be at risk. They may even carry some of the southern subspecies’ genes, as the two groups were known to hybridize in the past. That won’t be enough to save the southern black-throated finch from extinction, but at least some small part of them might survive inside of their cousins to the north.

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Museum's rare treasures revealed

Stashed away underground beneath a popular museum in Northumberland lies a vast collection of rare and precious items.

From hippo skulls to extinct birds, stuffed lions to poison spears, the Natural History Society of Northumbria's collection is one of the best in the world.

With more than half a million items kept in storage under the Discovery Museum in Newcastle, cataloguing the huge assortment is a lifetime's work.

The collection dates back to the mid-18th century and includes some items that are seen as priceless because of their rarity.

Dan Gordon, Keeper of Biology at Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, said: "The oldest parts of the collection date from the 18th century and were the private collection of a local aristocrat called Marmaduke Tunstall.

"Over the years it was passed on and came into the possession of a local society and it's important for a number of reasons, one being the very old and valuable items.

"We have records for half a million objects but there may well be more, and cataloguing them all is a lifetime's work. We are still discovering new things in the collection."

One of the rarest items is a juvenile Great Auk, a flightless bird that is now extinct but which was once commonplace in Great Britain.

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The REAL Angry Birds: Extinct relation of the pigeon was 'built for fighting'

By VICTORIA WOOLLASTON

PUBLISHED: 17:24, 24 May 2013 | UPDATED: 17:26, 24 May 2013 

· Researchers from London's Natural History Museum have discovered that the small 'musket ball' knobs found on the wings of the now extinct solitaire bird were used for fighting 

· It is thought that the knobs were a result of fighting and the Mauritian birds then evolved so the knobs developed naturally 

· The solitaires became extinct at the end of the 1700s but were genetically similar to modern-day pigeons 

A now extinct giant flightless pigeon from Mauritius used its small but deadly wings to fight off competitors and communicate with mates, according to new research published this week. 

Researchers from the Natural History Museum in London studied fossils of the solitaire, officially known as Pezophaps solitaria, and in particular the unique ‘musket ball’ structure on the bird’s wing. 

They discovered that the birds used the circular nodes as a way of fighting with other birds and fending off prey. 

Writing in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, ornithologist Julian Hume from the Natural History Museum said: ‘We know from detailed historical notes from eighteenth-century sailors that the birds were aggressive. 

'They also describe a musket-ball-like bony growth on the wings, which was originally thought to be the result of injury. 

When we compared the wings of solitaire fossils from the caves of Rodrigues, an outer island of Mauritius, to modern birds we found that these growths were largest in adult males. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2330392/The-REAL-angry-Birds-Archaeologists-aggresive-giant-birds.html#ixzz2UExlKRsb