A hungry falcon played a part in a failed attempt to establish a colony of critically endangered shore birds on Mana Island.
Thousands of migrating birds have inexplicably died in south-western US in what ornithologists have described as a national tragedy that is likely to be related to the climate crisis.
Protected areas are considered the most important tool for curbing the ongoing biodiversity loss, but a lack of field data hampers efforts to measure how effective they are in practice.
How many bird and mammal extinctions has recent conservation action prevented?
Aichi Target 12 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) contains the aim to ‘prevent extinctions of known threatened species’. To measure the degree to which this was achieved, we used expert elicitation to estimate the number of bird and mammal species whose extinctions were prevented by conservation action in 1993–2020 (the lifetime of the CBD) and 2010–2020 (the timing of Aichi Target 12). We found that conservation action prevented 21–32 bird and 7–16 mammal extinctions since 1993, and 9–18 bird and two to seven mammal extinctions since 2010.
The black stilt or kakī is a critically endangered wading bird with fewer than 200 individuals living in the wild. The main threat to the kakī is introduced predators, such as stoats, ferrets, rats and cats, but the birds are also vulnerable to flooding in their habitat.
Samoa's national bird, the near-extinct manumea, was spotted in Savai’i earlier this month. The bird was both heard and seen during a forest survey of Mount Silisili in Aopo in early August, and heard during a survey of Masmasa-Falelima National Park in July.
A large fruit-eating bird from Tonga joins the dodo in the line-up of giant island pigeons hunted to extinction.
For even the most sharp-eyed of ornithologists, one great tit can look much like another. But now researchers have built the first artificial intelligence tool capable of identifying individual small birds.
An island’s-worth of an incredibly rare bird species have flown the coop – most missing, presumed dead. All 29 shore plovers or tūturuatu relocated to Mana Island off the coast of Porirua since February, part of an effort to save the species, have vanished.
The Manumea is Samoa’s national bird and listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (I.U.C.N).