One in eight birds may go extinct due to habitat loss, warming

Climate change has emerged as a major factor behind the growing risk of extinction facing birds, the world's leading conservation agency warned on May 19. An eighth of all birds, including a sandpiper and an albatross, face extinction because their habitats are being destroyed and weather patterns are altered by global warming, the Red List of endangered species said. Of approximately 10,000 known species of birds, more than 1,200 are now threatened, the conservation groups International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and BirdLife International, which prepared the inventory, said on May 19. Eight species were raised to the highest category of threat, critically endangered. "Long-term drought and sudden extreme weather are putting additional stress on the pockets of habitat that many threatened species depend on," the IUCN said in a report. "This, coupled with extensive and expanding habitat destruction, has led to an increase in the rate of extinction on continents and away from islands, where most historical extinction has occurred." They included the Eurasian curlew and Dartford warbler, which lives in Europe and north-west Africa. Both were previously in the "Least Threatened" category. The report showed that Brazil and Indonesia had the highest number of threatened bird species with 141 and 133 respectively. "Species are being hit by the double whammy of habitat loss and climate change," Stuart Butchart, BirdLife's global research coordinator, said in a separate statement. "As populations become fragmented the effect of climate change can have an even greater impact, leading to an increased risk of local extinctions." Habitats are destroyed by human activities such as clearing forests for palm-oil plantations, the groups said. BirdLife has set up a "Preventing Extinctions" program to find conservation groups that will take responsibility for protecting each of the 190 bird species listed as critically endangered, the group said in the statement. One species newly rated as "critically endangered" is the Floreana Mockingbird, a vertebrate found only in the Galapagos Islands, an Ecuadorian territory in the Pacific Ocean. The latest assessment found the species has declined to just 60 individuals from 150 in 1966, all confined to two islets. The bird "is regularly affected by extreme weather events, which cause significant fluctuations in the size of the population, and the continuing drying of the climate is a cause for serious concern," the latest Red List assessment for the bird says. The seven other species whose category was raised to ``critically endangered'' include species of albatross, sandpiper, crow and bunting. Cambridge, England-based BirdLife is an association of conservation groups that work in more than 100 countries to protect birds.