Red List - increase in number of flagged species in Britain (1 Viewer)

[Phil Andrews]

BBC News - four UK bird species including puffins 'face extinction':

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34664385

Yet more bad news (yet probably not coming as a great surprise) for our beligured birdlife.

Link to the IUCN website if one wishes to look at the position on these and sadly many many other species: http://www.iucnredlist.org/search

 

[Nutcracker]

Some birds on there that surprise me, e.g. Puffin (population increasing in North Sea), Black-tailed Godwit (L. l. islandica at least increasing well, though L. l. limosa at higher risk), while others in severe decline are not on (I'd add Little Stint, Whinchat, Wood Warbler, Willow Tit - UK endemic P. montanus kleinschmidtii maybe critically endangered?).

 

[Richard Klim]

Link to the IUCN website if one wishes to look at the position on these and sadly many many other species: http://www.iucnredlist.org/search

For birds, it's probably easier to just use BirdLife Taxonomic Checklist v8 (Oct 2015), which gives the latest IUCN Red List category for each species, and is filterable by category. The scientific names in the spreadsheet are conveniently hyperlinked to the individual species factsheets justifying their threat categorisations.

Incidentally, the news item is slightly misleading in referring to the addition of four UK species to the "critical list": they've been uplisted to VU (Vulnerable), not CR (Critically Endangered) or even EN (Endangered)!

Some birds on there that surprise me, e.g. Puffin (population increasing in North Sea), Black-tailed Godwit (L. l. islandica at least increasing well, though L. l. limosa at higher risk), while others in severe decline are not on (I'd add Little Stint, Whinchat, Wood Warbler, Willow Tit - UK endemic P. montanus kleinschmidtii maybe critically endangered?).

Don't forget that, although the news item highlights UK species, these are the 2015 IUCN Red List global threat categorisations, and don't necessarily reflect local UK population trends. So, for example, Atlantic Puffin has been uplisted from LC (Least Concern) to VU (Vulnerable) mostly on the basis of significant declines in Iceland and Norway. [See species factsheet and extensive associated GTB Forum discussion.]

But, unlike USFWS, BirdLife/IUCN don't recognise subspecific taxa as conservation units – which is a major reason for BirdLife's ongoing application of the Tobias criteria to split species on an industrial scale...