The slender-billed curlew, Numenius tenuirostris, slipped from the world in the way of rare things: gradually, quietly, and irretrievably. Once it coursed over the steppes of Siberia and wintered along Mediterranean shores, its migratory path a delicate thread connecting continents. Its last confirmed sighting, in Morocco in 1995, marked the end of a lineage and the first recorded extinction of a mainland bird from Europe, North Africa, or West Asia.
For centuries, the curlew was elusive, almost mythic. Early ornithologists described its nesting grounds in Siberian bogs, but its habits and ecology remained enigmatic. Hunters in southern Europe and North Africa caught glimpses of it during its passage, often as game. By the mid-20th century, its decline was unmistakable, but its vanishing seemed to defy precise explanation. Drainage of wetlands, agricultural expansion, and relentless hunting frayed its numbers. Climate change, pollution, and other shadowy threats may have hastened its demise, though no one can say for certain.
Efforts to save it came too late. Expeditions scoured vast Siberian forests and Central Asian steppes, following whispers of sightings and clinging to fragile hope. Yet, as Alex Bond of London’s Natural History Museum reflected this week, “All this has turned up, unfortunately, is nothing.” The curlew had become, as so many others before it, a creature of memory.
Its extinction is not just an ecological loss but a moral indictment. Europe, with its wealth and resources, could not preserve one of its rarest avian treasures. Nicola Crockford of the RSPB posed a searing question: “How can we expect countries beyond Europe to step up for their species when our comparatively wealthy countries have failed”
The slender-billed curlew’s absence now reverberates beyond its marshes and migratory paths. It is a grim emblem of the fragility of life and the consequences of human neglect. In its silence lies a warning: without vigilance, stewardship, and a profound reckoning with the forces reshaping our world, others will follow its flight into the void.
Buchanan, G M; Chapple, B; Berryman, A J; Crockford, N; Jansen, J J F J; and Bond, A L. 2024. Global extinction of Slender-billed Curlew (Numenius tenuirostris). IBIS. DOI: 10.1111/ibi.13368
