The last known photo of the slender-billed curlew, a grayish-brown migratory waterbird, was taken in February 1995 at Merja Zerga, on Morocco’s Atlantic coast.
There will likely never be another one.
The species, Numenius tenuirostris, has officially been declared extinct by the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority.
“The extinction of the Slender-billed Curlew is a tragic and sobering moment for migratory bird conservation,” Amy Fraenkel, executive secretary of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), said in a statement. “It underscores the urgency of implementing effective conservation measures to ensure the survival of migratory species.”
Details of the exact breeding and wintering sites of the slender-billed curlew have been hazy at best, although it’s known to have bred in Siberia and the Kazakh Steppe, and migrated to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
In June 1995, the slender-billed curlew was included among 255 priority species of waterbirds listed in the then-new Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA), according to the CMS press release.
The latest IUCN assessment of the species notes that historically the slender-billed curlew was likely locally common, but there were signs of decline as early 1912. By the 1940s, researchers were warning the bird might already be close to extinct.
In a study published November 2024, researchers concluded the bird most likely went extinct sometime in the mid-1990s, after that last verified sighting in Morocco. At the time, Graeme Buchanan, the study’s lead author and conservation scientist with U.K-based NGO Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), told Mongabay the study was born out of the need for a formal, quantitative assessment of the species’ status, so conservation support wasn’t withdrawn too soon or too late.
The latest IUCN assessment now confirms the species’ extinction. “This is the first-ever recorded global bird extinction from mainland Europe, North Africa, and West Asia,” Esther Kettel, an ecologist at Nottingham Trent University, U.K., writes in The Conversation.
Geoff Hilton, conservation scientist at U.K.-based charity Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust, previously told Mongabay that news of the bird’s extinction was “a source of deep sadness.”
“We arguably spent too much time watching the bird’s decline and not enough actually trying to fix things,” he said. “Although that’s easy to say: it’s not clear what really we could have done that would have made a difference.”
Migratory shorebirds like the slender-billed curlew have been declining worldwide, Birdlife International warned last year. “The Eurasian curlew (Numenius arquata), a relative of the slender-bill, is of particular conservation concern and is thought to be the UK’s most rapidly declining species,” Kettel writes.
“[T]he Slender-billed Curlew’s extinction serves as a poignant reminder that conservation frameworks must be implemented swiftly, backed by adequate science, resources and sustained political will,” Jacques Trouvilliez, the AEWA executive secretary, said in the press release.
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