Slender hope for the slender-bill

Richard Collins says slender-billed curlew may be Europe’s ‘Dodo’

END-OF-YEAR eco-stocktaking prompts a tale of two curlews. The past year has passed without the sighting of a bird that ornithologists hope still survives in Siberia.

A strange wader turned up at Minsmere, Suffolk, in October, 2004, which birdwatchers came from far and wide to see. Some thought it was ‘Europe’s dodo’, a slender-billed curlew, but others disagreed. The argument became so heated that it made the columns of the London Times. It’s just about possible that a slender-billed visited Minsmere but the visitor was probably a slightly odd-looking, but ordinary, Eurasian curlew.