TY - JOUR
T1 - Eggs of the 'lost' Slender-billed Curlew Numenius tenuirostris
AU - Bond, Alexander L.
AU - Buchanan, Graeme M.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Genaddy Bachurin, Nikolai Balatsky, René Corado, Igor Fadeev, Emma-Sofia Hyytiäinen, Roman Kashkarov, Abolghasem Khaleghizadeh, Svetlana Meshicheryagina, Maxim Mitropolsky, Sergei Moskvitin, Olivier Pauwels, Rachel Petts, Kees Roselaar, Douglas Russell and Manuel Schweizer for their assistance in various collections, answering numerous enquiries, and providing potential leads over a number of years. We also acknowledge the voluminous support of the library teams at The Bodleian Library, Univ. of Oxford, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Natural History Museum who made this research possible. Comments from D. G. D. Russell and G. M. Kirwan improved the submitted manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors.
PY - 2022/12/7
Y1 - 2022/12/7
N2 - Slender-billed Curlew Numenius tenuirostris is Critically Endangered and may be extinct. Its breeding biology is known exclusively from early 20th-century accounts from central Russia and Kazakhstan, and the eggs were heretofore known from a single specimen in the Manchester Museum. Here, we provide details of five additional putative Slender-billed Curlew eggs held in public and private collections. The eggs show remarkable variation in size, with two being only 85% of the mean length and breadth. Notably, one of the putative clutches was from the European side of the Ural Mountains, far to the west of the established breeding range. Molecular identification would aid in identifying additional specimens, which would be easily confused with eggs of other Numenius.
AB - Slender-billed Curlew Numenius tenuirostris is Critically Endangered and may be extinct. Its breeding biology is known exclusively from early 20th-century accounts from central Russia and Kazakhstan, and the eggs were heretofore known from a single specimen in the Manchester Museum. Here, we provide details of five additional putative Slender-billed Curlew eggs held in public and private collections. The eggs show remarkable variation in size, with two being only 85% of the mean length and breadth. Notably, one of the putative clutches was from the European side of the Ural Mountains, far to the west of the established breeding range. Molecular identification would aid in identifying additional specimens, which would be easily confused with eggs of other Numenius.
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U2 - 10.25226/bboc.v142i4.2022.a7
DO - 10.25226/bboc.v142i4.2022.a7
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85145468978
SN - 0007-1595
VL - 142
SP - 480
EP - 486
JO - Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club
JF - Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club
IS - 4
ER -