The story In terms of extinct birds the Hawaiian Islands are one of the world’s black spots. The losses at species and subspecies level have been enormous and there is no sign that this process is letting up. There are several species and races that are unlikely to see out the next decade, such as […]
Tag: HBW 7 extinct species
Rodrigues Pigeon (Alectroenas rodericana)
The story This species is known from bones discovered on Rodrigues during the 1870’s and described by Alphonse Milne-Edwards, the celebrated expert on fossil birds at the Paris museum. Milne-Edwards described the species primarily on the evidence of a sternum, and chose to assign it to the genus Columba, whereas later researchers have shown an […]
Akialoa (Hemignathus obscurus)
The story Because it is so poorly known, the honeycreeper family, in particular its extinct members, arouses a certain amount of controversy. It is classified and reclassified over and over again, and drastic revisions of the family are made from time to time. Unfortunately, these revisions are, of necessity, made from specimen material rather than […]
Kittlitzs Thrush (Zoothera terrestris)
The story The name of Baron Friedrich Heinrich von Kittlitz is associated with the stories of several extinct birds. During the late 1820’s he explored a number of Pacific islands during a round-the-world expedition on a Russian corvette called the Senjawin. In June 1829 Kittlitz landed on Peel Island (Chichi-jima), the largest island in the […]
Rodrigues Solitaire (Pezophaps solitaria)
The story The island of Rodrigues, far out in the Indian Ocean, is one of the Mascarene group and here a dodo-like species evolved from an ancestral pigeon stock. This species has become known as the Rodrigues Solitaire. The Huguenot refugee Francois Leguat, whose name occurs so regularly in the stories of extinct birds, took […]
Rodrigues Night-heron (Nycticorax megacephalus)
The story During 1691 a small band of Huguenots, fleeing from religious persecution in France, ended up marooned for around two years on the Mascarene island of Rodrigues, far out in the Indian Ocean. Their leader was one Francois Leguat, and this gentleman made notes on the things he saw during his stay on the […]
Auckland Merganser (Mergus australis)
The story The Auckland Islands lie some 320 km south of New Zealand and this rather forlorn group was once home to a species of merganser that, while not entirely flightless, showed a marked reduction in wing size compared with its relatives. As often happens when birds develop in evolutionary backwaters (i.e. areas without mammalian […]
Koa Finch (Rhodacanthis palmeri)
The story The Koa Finch is something of a mystery. Was it one species or was it two? Were the “Greater” and “Lesser” Koa Finches both members of the same species? During 1891 Henry Palmer was busy collecting specimens on the Hawaiian Islands for Walter Rothschild. The enormously wealthy scion of the famous banking family […]
Rodrigues Starling (Necropsar rodericanus)
The story The skeletal remains of a starling were found on the island of Rodrigues during the 1870’s. Although there may be no connection, these bones have been associated with a brief account in the document known as the Relation de l’Ile Rodrigue, which was probably written by a marooned sailor named Tafforet during 1725. […]
Crested Shelduck (Tadorna cristata)
The story Only a very few specimens of this striking duck are in existence, and virtually nothing is known of it in life. Even the limits of its original range are a matter of speculation; there is an assumption that it bred in eastern Siberia and migrated to Korea and Japan, but this may be […]