Slender-billed Curlew
Please will somebody else photograph a Slender-billed Curlew?
Why Chris Gomersall doesn’t want to go down in history as the last person to have photographed this beautiful bird
Twenty five years ago, on 2 February, 1995, I happened to get lucky and successfully photographed the critically- endangered Slenderbilled Curlew, at its last known wintering ground of Merja Zerga in Morocco. With no further verifiable sightings from anywhere in the world since (Birdlife International, 2017), we may soon have to accept that this represents the first bird extinction in the Western Palearctic region since the Great Auk in 1884. What a depressing prospect.
From 1984 to 1998, I was employed as the full-time staff photographer for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). My principal assignment in Morocco was to photograph another rare bird, the Northern Bald Ibis, but also to document the important bird areas and wetland habitats of Souss-Massa, Sidi Bou
Ghaba and Merja Zerga. The latter was a traditional wintering site for the Slenderbilled Curlew, but their numbers had been dwindling for some time and this particular winter reduced to a lone individual. Sightings had been infrequent, but I thought it was worth giving it a day out of my two-week trip, and duly engaged the services of Hassan Dalil, a local bird guide who came highly recommended.
And so Hassan and I met up at about 7am that winter morning, by the edge of the brackish lagoon, just below a strawberry packing plant. My field notebook records that on our way down through the cultivated area to the saltmarsh, we saw three African Marsh Owls hunting and flushed two Quail. It was a pretty dreary morning of low cloud, and slow to get light, but after about half an hour, a flock of curlew flew over, presumably leaving their night time roost and heading out to feed – clearly all (Eurasian) Curlew.
However, at about 7.45am a smaller bird dropped into a field of barely germinated winter wheat about 400 metres away from us, and observing through a telescope, we quickly established that this was indeed the Slender-billed Curlew, which was
already familiar to Hassan – though few of his recent birding clients had been quite so fortunate.
Flushed away
This was a much more delicate looking and impeccably marked bird than either Curlew or Whimbrel. Most significantly, it showed a very fine, dark bill, with a much slighter downwards curve. The dark crown and pale supercilium were also evident, and its heavily-spotted white belly reminded me of a Song Thrush in its pattern.
We hardly had time to take all this in before the bird was flushed by a group of children approaching on foot, and we e watched anxiously as it flew a further 500 metres away before landing again and resuming feeding.
There was little natural cover in this flat landscape, but I worked out an approach route that involved me crawling on all fours between rows of cultivated lupins with my camera bag and tripod. Meanwhile, Hassan very helpfully distracted the local children and successfully prevented further disturbance. Once I was within about 100 metres of the bird, and was fairly sure that
it would tolerate my presence, I began to take photographs.
Fortunately, I was able to expose nearly another four rolls of film on this exceptionally rare bird, as it continued to feed before me. Mostly it foraged at about 50 metres away, occasionally as close as 40 metres, measured on the focusing scale on my lens. Incredibly, this close encounter was to last for about an hour and 20 minutes, until eventually it flew off to another area of the lagoon.
As I walked back to rejoin and thank Hassan, both of us had wide grins on our faces. “How often does this happen?” I asked. “Never!” he replied. Of course, it would be another couple of weeks before I would be able to have my films processed and see the transparencies on the light box, but I was pretty confident that we’d achieved something special that day.
The photographic record of this species was pretty sparse and already well known to me. Michel Brosselin’s remarkable black-and-white photographs of Slenderbilled Curlew at a roost with Curlews, taken in Brittany in 1968, were represented in the RSPB photo collection, which was housed in my office. I had also seen Richard Porter’s more recent colour slides of a bird he had found and photographed in Yemen, as well as a short video clip from Merja Zerga the previous year – and that’s about all there was. This new portfolio of close-ups in colour of a presumed adult would surely be a significant boost to the archive, and so it has proved.
My Slender-billed Curlew photographs have subsequently been published a great many times, largely in the absence of good alternatives. Out of about 150 frames of film exposed taken that day, I retain a core library of 43 original transparencies, from which I have recently made some new digital copies. Some of the images accompanying this article have never been published, to my knowledge.
In the years since, an awful lot of effort has been expended in trying to locate other Slender-billed Curlews. I spoke to Nicola Crockford, the chair of the Slenderbilled Curlew Working Group (now dormant, pending a confirmed record of the bird), and Richard Porter, another world authority on this species, to discover what has been happening.
Fruitless search
Attention initially focused on the former nesting ground of Slender-billed Curlew near Tara in Omsk, Siberia, from where a few eggs were taken around 1909, but this is a massive area and so far all ground searches have proved fruitless. More recently, stable isotope analysis of
museum skins has pointed to other potential historic nesting areas in the steppes of Kazakhstan, much further south, but no birds have been discovered to date.
Much hope has also been invested in the possibility of locating a wintering, passage or moulting bird and attaching a satellite transmitter, to be able to follow its migration and hopefully lead us to its breeding area. For a long time such tags were simply too big and too heavy to be used safely; the target weight was 5g or less, but they are now as light as 2g.
Critically endangered
To that end, a rapid response team of scientists has been standing by, ready to deploy anywhere in the world at short notice, should any fresh sighting be deemed viable by the international verification panel of the Slender-billed Curlew Working Group. And we now know that the technique can work, after a satellite transmitter was successfully attached to a similar-sized Steppe Whimbrel in Mozambique. This bird then flew nearly 3,100 miles north on its normal migration route, before the tag fell off at its staging site in Yemen.
Additionally, between 2009 and 2011, there were extensive, co-ordinated surveys of known or potential wintering grounds throughout the Mediterranean, coasts of Arabia, Black and Caspian Sea regions. Volunteers surveyed more than 680 sites in 19 countries, with further searches in another 12 countries. These did not reveal any definite new sightings of Slender-billed Curlew, even though they produced lots of other interesting and useful information.
The situation today is that the Slenderbilled Curlew remains officially classified as ‘critically endangered’, and not yet ‘presumed extinct’, although a number of authors are already assuming the worst. The prognosis doesn’t look terribly optimistic, but Birdlife International offers the following advice:
‘You can help in the search. Anyone birdwatching across its range who suspects they are looking at a potential Slender-billed Curlew should take detailed notes and photographs. These will be essential to assess the veracity of the record. They should contact the Slenderbilled Curlew working group without delay (email nicola.crockford@rspb.org. uk). Further information on Slender-billed Curlews, including a downloadable identification leaflet, can be found at slenderbilledcurlew.net’
I am still hoping for the best. If you don’t mind, I would rather not be known as the guy who photographed the last Slender-billed Curlew.