Extinct birds
Dodo, based on Roelant Savery's 1626 painting of a stuffed specimen– note the two same-side feet.
Since 1500, over 100 species of birds have become extinct, and this rate of extinction seems to be increasing. The situation is exemplified by Hawai‘i, where 30% of all known recently extinct species originally lived. Other areas, such as Guam, have also been hard hit; Guam has lost over 60% of its native species in the last 30 years, many of them to the introduced Brown Tree Snake.
There are today about 10,000 species of birds, with roughly 1200 considered to be under threat of extinction. Except for a dozen or so species the threat is man-made.
Island species in general, and flightless island species in particular are most at risk. The disproportionate number of rails in the list reflects the tendency of that family to lose the ability to fly when geographically isolated. Even more rails became extinct before they could be described by scientists; these taxa are listed in Later Quaternary Prehistoric Birds.
The extinction dates are usually approximations of the actual date of extinction. In some cases, more exact dates are given as it is sometimes possible to pinpoint the date of extinction to a specific year or even day (the San Benedicto Rock Wren is possibly the most extreme example - its extinction could be timed with an accuracy of maybe half an hour). Extinction dates in the literature are usually the dates of the last verified record (credible observation or specimen taken); in many Pacific birds which became extinct shortly after European contact, however, this leaves an uncertainty period of over a century because the islands on which they used to occur were only rarely visited by scientists.
List adapted, expanded and updated from that in Extinct Birds, Fuller, ISBN 0-19-850837-9 (Extinct Birds is an absorbing study of the world's recently extinct bird species, the first complete survey since Walter Rothschild's classic work of 1907)
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