Birds to Watch In Context

Birds To Watch 2

At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro biological diversity rose from its humble origins in the recondite vocabulary of tropical ecologists to become a new influence in the social, economic and political thinking of late twentieth century man. The coming into force of the Convention on Biological Diversity, on 29 December 1993, was perhaps final confirmation that the conservation of nature has attained an appropriate level on the global agenda of the community of nations.

The community of conservationists accordingly rejoiced, but not for long; there is not the time. After years of struggling to find a voice, to find a message, with which to articulate the truth about the fate of the planet's wildlife, the winning formula proved to be one in which generality was crucial. Tales of the plight of tigers, dolphins, beetles and even the rosy periwinkle-that hardy perennial of the utilitarian dreamscape-had ultimately failed; yet, as virtual stowaways in the ark called biodiversity, all these things have suddenly found a possible future. So now the urgent challenge to conservation is to be specific once more, but this time in an orderly, rational manner that optimizes the integration of its aspirations with those of wider human development.

Part of the challenge lies in simply defining biodiversity, deciding what strategies are most appropriate to which of its components, and setting priorities in terms of relative values and time limits. Information is of course the fuel that drives this process but, like fuel, its value depends on its refinement and on its adaptability to different needs. Since it is, after all, those elements of biodiversity which the planet is likely to lose that should be the prime target of conservation (Collar 1994a), there are two plain steps to be taken: identify and document the potential losses from the global stock of biodiversity, and identify and document the sites on the planet where those potential losses can be saved in the most cost-effective aggregations.

BirdLife International (formerly the International Council for Bird Preservation, ICBP), has consistently practised and pioneered both these activities over the past decade. It has focused on those elements of the global avifauna that are most fragile: threatened and near-threatened species, species with restricted ranges, species exposed to danger by their dependence on vulnerable habitats, species beyond the reach of protected-area networks. The conversion of the resulting mass of data into user-friendly packages that make sites rather than species the units of concern (since 1989 under the label of 'Important Bird Areas') has merely been the logical extension of the refinement process, and will serve as the central plank of BirdLife policy and programme for the remainder of the millenium.

This is not to pretend that the goals of biodiversity conservation can be met simply through a series of species-driven but site-oriented initiatives to create a network of variously protected areas. As Imboden (1994) has pointed out, the problem with a network is that it is full of holes. The impact of human development on our planet is incurring virtually unquantifiable but assuredly massive losses of biodiversity through the steady, undramatic erosion of populations of thousands of species of animals and plants which, as species, are currently regarded as secure. The challenge here is one that only a collective acceptance of responsibility and a broad commitment of resources can overcome: Imboden's concept of an 'ecoblanket', to catch and hold the diversity of nature through the assignation of purposely defined functions to all parts of the landscape, sketches out the basis for a new kind of thinking and planning that will help to harmonize the integration of conservation and development in the twenty-first century.

The most basic of all BirdLife's commitments remains, however, the prevention of global extinction through the identification and documentation of threatened species. Red Data Books (RDBs) were instituted 30 years ago, in 1964, for this precise purpose, and their compilation has been a part of the BirdLife programme ever since. The first Birds to watch came into being in response to calls for an annotated list of all globally threatened birds, to fill the information gap that was arising as parts of the international bird Red Data Book were being prepared. After two early versions (Vincent 1966-1971, King 1978-1979), the third 'edition' of the RDB was initiated in 1981 and has been anticipated to take the form of four parts, for Africa (Collar and Stuart 1985), the Americas (Collar et al. 1992), Asia (volume now being planned; see below) and Australasia and the Pacific, possibly with the inclusion of the (non-Asian) Holarctic. The delay between parts has not, it should be stressed, reflected the time it takes to compile them-rather the availability of manpower and money (Collar 1994b); but irrespective of this issue, it was still clear that a single volume, serving as an abbreviated RDB, would keep track of the plight of species already treated in past RDBs, and highlight the plight of many others due for full treatment in future RDBs.

This, then, is a replacement volume of a book first published six years ago (Collar and Andrew 1988). Bearing almost the same title, and dealing in the same basic manner with the same subject, this new work has the character of a second edition; nevertheless, it represents an entirely new evaluation of the world's threatened bird species, using new criteria, a more standardized presentation of the texts, and some overview analysis of the data.

One obvious difficulty with the Birds to watch approach is the difference in data quality influencing the evaluation of species' status. Those that have not yet been fully investigated or treated by the RDB process cannot be judged with the same degree of confidence as many of those that have. It is particularly difficult to be confident of the appropriate categorization of species (the first Birds to watch did not even attempt this; merely identifying threatened species was challenge enough). We must stress that considerable effort and thought (outlined below) have been invested in our reviews of Asia, Australasia and the Pacific (and, in the case of Australia, we were able to draw directly on an independently produced analysis of threatened birds by Garnett 1992, 1993). However, because the consultation process was necessarily constrained by considerations of time and budget, the listings of species from these regions should be regarded as candidate lists for Threatened birds of Asia, a project of the BirdLife Asian Partnership (supported by the Environmental Agency of Japan through the Wild Bird Society of Japan) beginning in 1994, and, in due course, for the fourth volume that will complete the third edition of the RDB.

Birds to watch 2 was begun in the third quarter of 1993, with the target of completion by the time of the BirdLife World Conference in Rosenheim, Germany, in August 1994, and with the intention that this second edition should use the new criteria for evaluating threatened species being developed (with BirdLife's participation) for IUCN. As it happened, the finalization of the IUCN committee's proposals took until November 1993, but even as we worked on the book we identified certain problems and actually caused a few minor adjustments to be made to the criteria as late as May 1994; so the book and the criteria have developed together.

Finally here it should be noted that BirdLife's Red Data Book programme is the source of birds treated on the 'IUCN Red List' series. However, the most recent Red List (Groombridge 1993a) was revised at a stage when work on Birds to watch 2 was only just beginning, and it was agreed that the 1994 Red List would conflate species from its 1990 list (derived from the first Birds to watch) with those from Threatened birds of the Americas. In other words, the 1994 Red List has a very different composition of bird species from Birds to watch 2. Nevertheless, Birds to watch 2 is the official source for birds for the IUCN Red List, so the list of threatened birds it contains replaces the list in Groombridge (1993a).

Candidate lists for the project existed in the form of species listed as threatened and near-threatened in Collar and Stuart (1985), Collar and Andrew (1988) and Collar et al. (1992), species identified in Stattersfield et al. (in prep.) as being of restricted range (<50,000 km2; see ICBP 1992), and species characterized as having unfavourable conservation status in Europe (Tucker and Heath 1994). The BirdLife Secretariat library holdings (which includes correspondence files for hundreds of fieldworkers and observers) are constantly extended and updated with material on all such species and the topics relating to their conservation, and these, together with the distributional database compiled during BirdLife's Biodiversity Project (see ICBP 1992, Crosby 1994), provided the bulk of further material. However, recent literature was also surveyed in the Zoology Library, Scientific Periodicals Library and University Library, Cambridge, the RSPB Library, Sandy, and the Alexander (Edward Grey Institute) Library, Oxford, U.K.

From these sources draft texts were prepared and sent for review. The list for Europe had the benefit of input from the many sources brought together in Tucker and Heath (1994). For Africa, the review was fairly extensive, since the African RDB has now been in print for nine years. For the Americas, the review was much more limited, since the Americas RDB is only two years old. For Australasia and the Pacific, the target was to have each species text reviewed at least once. For Asia, the review was confined to a small number of experts, since the full RDB programme is shortly to begin, and there was concern not to cause confusion by a major review at this stage; for this reason, the Asian species list remains provisional and awaits fuller evaluation in the impending RDB programme. The Australasia and Pacific lists are also essentially provisional (except for Australia, for which a recent formal in-country assessment has been used).

Data for the Indonesian species texts were compiled with the full participation of the BirdLife Indonesia Programme, chiefly by S. van Balen and P. Jepson, who organized the review of draft texts by a small number of experts in-country.

Contributions from users of this book-corrections, commentary, updates-are always welcome and will be stored for future reference and/or passed to the relevant BirdLife Partner organizations. Information concerning Asian species will be particularly timely, and be used in Threatened birds of Asia.

The collision between the phylogenetic and biological species concepts has deprived the world of a broadly accepted list of bird species. Previously the bird RDB, like CITES, used Morony et al. (1975) as the basic list, but the publication of Sibley and Monroe (1990, 1993), for all the controversy surrounding this work, could not long be ignored. In March 1992 CITES officially adopted this new list as its taxonomic guide, and it was also adopted by ICBP in its study of global centres of endemism (ICBP 1992). We do likewise, but not without points of divergence (see below), and like CITES we retain the sequence of families as in Morony et al. (1975), accepting the need for stability in macrosystematics until judgements on avian relationships are more widely and confidently agreed (see Mayr and Bock 1994). This arrangement has, however, led to certain sequential anomalies in the large subfamilies of thrushes (Turdinae) and babblers (Timaliinae).

The points of divergence on species limits particularly refer to Africa, where some of the judgements in Sibley and Monroe (1990) have been subject to review and rejection by Dowsett and Forbes-Watson (1993) and Dowsett and Dowsett-Lemaire (1993). We have largely followed the opinions of these latter authors, although in a number of cases we have retained or advanced specific status based on earlier RDB listing or else on the recent evidence of fieldworkers. Elsewhere in the world we have sometimes accepted forms elevated to species status in evaluations too recent to be in Sibley and Monroe (1990, 1993); all cases where our own judgements have prevailed are explicit in the species texts and listed here in Box 1. Some other potential splits were brought to our attention by reviewers (Box 2), but we were unable to research their taxonomic and conservation status in the time available. What certainly emerges here is the considerable discrepancy between the recent levels of taxonomic scrutiny in the Americas and those elsewhere in the world, suggesting that many more forms are liable for future elevation to species level in the Old World.

English names are based as far as possible on Sibley and Monroe (1990, 1993), but again there are points of divergence, again with Africa being an area of resistance to apparently undebated alterations to long-standing names. Names of birds are an abiding cause of discussion among ornithologists, and it is clearly impossible for workers producing international lists to satisfy both the interests of uniformity and the expectations of tradition, and we would plead with all parties to see the virtues of each other's position, and to work steadily towards compromise. Meanwhile, where alternatives present themselves we continue to apply one principle first expressed in Collar and Stuart (1985, p. xix), which is to prefer places to people in the names of birds, thereby perhaps enhancing the local or national motivation to conserve the species in question.

Place names are spelt, as far as it has been possible to check, in accordance with The Times atlas of the world: comprehensive edition (1993). Geopolitical units are recognized according to the latest lists produced by the International Standards Organization (ISO) and the United Nations (but we separate the islands of Ascension, Gough and the Tristan da Cunha group from St Helena, which otherwise subsumes them in these lists); political association and dependency are indicated by placing the appropriate nation in brackets. There is an unresolved-and probably unresolvable-problem over the global standardization of habitat and vegetation descriptions; we have used local names where these have been considered the most appropriate.

The text entry for each species is intended to reveal four key items of information: distribution at least by country, population status or trend, habitat(s), and threat(s). All these elements are necessary for the sound application of the criteria we have adopted in order to evaluate the candidacy of species (see next chapter). However, the order in which these data appear depends on how the entry was constructed, and this in turn has depended on a variety of factors, notably the quantity and type of material available.

Geopolitical units in bold type are range states, that is to say those in which the species breeds or otherwise occurs with regularity. These range states are listed with the species they hold in Appendix 1 (p. 243). Geopolitical units for which a species is mentioned as of likely occurrence, to which it is vagrant, or from which it has died out, are treated in normal type (if mentioned at all) and excluded from Appendix 1.

Standard conventions and methods of organization, such as referencing, follow those explained in the introductions to the third edition RDBs and the first Birds to watch. In some cases information was conflated from a set of references in such a way that the only sensible option was to group the sources at the end of a full sentence; in others it was possible to locate references adjacent to the information they impart. It should be noted that data summarized in previous RDBs, particularly Threatened birds of the Americas, are usually referred to these sources only (this sometimes may appear unfair on major sources of information on which the RDB has drawn, but it remains the simplest and most even-handed method); other references added to such entries usually represent updating sources, or else have been found to contain information that modifies what appears in the RDB entry in question. In general, species which have been treated fully in RDBs have slightly shorter entries. Abbreviations have been used for some sources, as follows.

The text of this book is largely an output from a simple database that contains a single record for each of the species covered (Box 3). This was developed from one of the databases used during the BirdLife Biodiversity Project and described in ICBP (1992) and Crosby (1994).

Species may be output from the database in taxonomic sequence using two fields, 'Family' and 'Sequence'. By indexing on both of these fields we have output species in the family sequence of Morony et al. (1975), and the within-family species sequence of Sibley and Monroe (1990, 1993).

The IUCN threat categories are stored in the 'Category' field, which permits the output of data on all species within a particular category or group of categories (e.g. Appendix 3). The 'Globally Threatened Species' section of the book (p. 28) was produced by outputting to a text file the 'Species text' field for those species in the categories Critical, Endangered, Vulnerable and Extinct in the Wild, together with the category of threat and the IUCN codes allocated to them. The species texts for 'Extinct Species' (p. 210), 'Conservation Dependent Species' (p. 213) and 'Data Deficient Species' (p. 215) were output in a similar manner. It is not possible to use text-formatting commands (e.g. italics or bold) within database fields in the package used, so such commands were included as text codes and subsequently converted into the required formats using word-processor macros.

The 'Breeding range' and 'Non-breeding range' fields were used to store the ISO codes of all geopolitical units within each species' range. These were used to generate the range state lists given for Near-threatened Species (p. 222). They were also used, together with several other fields, to generate Appendix 1 (p. 243), which summarizes and lists the occurrence of species by category within each geopolitical unit.

All threatened species were coded according to the broad habitats which they regularly use and the threats which are currently affecting them (the simple classification system employed is shown on p. 243), and these codings were stored in the 'Habitats' and 'Threats' fields. These codings have been used to perform the analyses which are described under 'Trends and Factors in the Global Endangerment of Birds' (see Figures 5 and 6 on p. 25). Further codes record each species' status in the previous edition of Birds to watch.

Any species recognized by us but not by Sibley and Monroe (1990, 1993) has a comment indicating this in the text. In addition, we list these birds here.

We have attempted to be responsive to views and judgements on species limits, but after considerable deliberation concluded that the following may require wider endorsement as full species. Nevertheless, we strongly urge recognition of their plight, as some of them are highly threatened forms (all would qualify as globally threatened), and at the national level deserve high priority.

Chatham Islands Albatross Diomedea (cauta) eremita:New Zealand.

Heard Island Shag Phalacrocorax (atriceps) nivalis: Australia.

Macquarie Island Shag

Cape Verde Falcon (peregrinus) madens: Cape Verde.

Hawaiian Stilt Himantopus (mexicanus) knudseni: Hawaiian Islands (U.S.A.).

Chatham Islands Parakeet

Orange-fronted Parakeet Cyanoramphus auriceps (C. malherbi): New Zealand.

Caatinga Black-tyrant

Pohnpei Cicadabird Coracina (tenuirostris) insperatum: Micronesia.

Yap Cicadabird Coracina(tenuirostris) nesiotis: Micronesia.

Kadavu Island Thrush (poliocephalus) ruficeps: Fiji.

Guadalcanal Thrush Zoothera (margaretae) turipavae: Solomon Islands.

Cinnamon Quail-thrush Cinclosoma (cinnamomeum) alisteri: Australia.

Manua Fiji Shrikebill Clytorhynchus (vitiensis) powelli: American Samoa.

Vella Lavella Monarch Monarcha (browni) nigrotectus: Solomon Islands.

Biak Golden Monarch Monarcha (chrysomela) kordensis: Indonesia.

Ugi Monarch Monarcha (castaneiventris) ugiensis: Solomon Islands.

Kosrae White-eye Zosterops (cinerea) cinerea: Micronesia.

Oahu Elepaio Chasiempis(sandwichensis) ibidis: Hawaiian Islands (U.S.A.).

Oahu Amakihi Viridonia (virens) chloris: Hawaiian Islands (U.S.A.).

Box 3. The Birds to watch database.

The names of fields in the database, with a description of the contents of each.

Species

This information comes from Birds to Watch 2: (The World List of Threatened Birds), NJ Collar, MJ Crosby and AJ Stattersfield (1994) BirdLife, Cambridge. This is the official source for birds on the IUCN Red List.

BirdLife is interested in hearing about new information or references on threatened species. See contact details at the end of this page.

Birds to Watch 2 and other publications are available for purchase from Natural History Book Service email: nhbs@nhbs.co.uk, http://www.nhbs.com.

For further information please write to: Wellbrook Court, Girton Road, Cambridge, UK CB3 ONA Tel: +44 1223 277318 Email: redlist@birdlife.org Document URL: http:// www.unep-wcmc.org /species/data/birdlife/btw1.htm Revision date: -September-2007 Current date: -May-2008 Comments © BirdLife