New Caledonia Nightjar
| New Caledonia Nightjar | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Systematics | ||||||||||
|
||||||||||
| Scientific name | ||||||||||
| Eurostopodus exul | ||||||||||
| Mayr , 1941 |
The New Caledonia nightjar ( Eurostopodus exul ) is a scarcely researched and possibly extinct bird species from the nightjar family (Caprimulgidae). It was endemic to New Caledonia in Melanesia and is only known from the type specimen collected in 1939.
features
The holotype , an adult female, measures 26 cm and weighs 77 g. The wing length is 184 mm. The plumage is overall light silver-gray with rather sparse black-brown spots and dashes on the top. The crown is blackish. The gray-brown wing-covers are speckled brown and broadly whitish yellow-brown spotted. The shoulder feathers are grayish brown on the inside flags, grayish white on the outside flags and broad black-brown dashed in the middle. The wing markings are similar to those of the Solomon Nightjar. A neck collar is missing. The chest is brown, dull gray-white and grayish brown. The throat is marked by a small white patch.
Systematics
The New Caledonia-nightjar was temporarily both the beard Eight Schwalbe ( Eurostopodus mystacalis ) and the Salomon nightjar ( Eurostopodus nigripennis ) as conspecific . It differs from the latter in the noticeably shorter wings, the more whitish granite-gray upper side, the clearer, wider and more uniformly black center of the crown and the slightly reddish-brown colored rear nape. 1999 assumed the British ecologist Chris Doughty, that it is-nightjar Caledonia a copy in which the Irrgast could act beard Eight Schwalbe from Australia. Ernst Mayr , who considered the New Caledonia nightjar as a subspecies of the bearded nightjar, however, clearly went into the differences between the two taxa in his first scientific description from 1941. In 1989 the New Caledonia nightjar was first listed as a separate species by Storrs Olson and Jean-Christophe Balouet . Several authors and checklists have followed this view, including IOC World Bird Names , HBW and BirdLife Illustrated Checklist , BirdLife International , IUCN , Howard & Moore Checklist of the Birds of the World, and the Clements Checklist of Birds of the World.
status
The IUCN lists the Caledonia-nightjar in the category "threatened with extinction" ( critically endangered ) with the addition "possibly extinct" ( possibly extinct ). On August 21, 1939, the bird collector Thomas L. Macmillan, who was in New Caledonia on behalf of the Whitney South Sea Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History , caught the only known specimen, a female in the state of egg-laying, in a savannah dominated by myrtle heather in a coastal plain near Mont Panié . In 1998 there was an extensive search expedition of this type, but it was unsuccessful. Regarding the disappearance, the ornithologist Nigel Cleere suspects bushfires and the stalking by rats, dogs and cats. The little fire ant ( Wasmannia auropunctata ) is also a threat, as its stings in the eyes of birds or wild animals can blind the victims.
literature
- Ekstrom, JMM, Jones, JPG, Willis, J., Tobias, J., Dutson, GCL & Barré, N. (2002): New information on the distribution, status and conservation of terrestrial bird species in Grande Terre, New Caledonia In : Emu 102 (2): 197-207.
- Julian Pender Hume, Michael Walters: Extinct Birds. A & C Black, London 2012, ISBN 1-4081-5725-X , p. 202.
Web links
- Eurostopodus exul inthe IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2014.3. Listed by: BirdLife International, 2014. Retrieved February 14, 2015.
- BirdLife International: Species Factsheet - New Caledonian Nightjar ( Eurostopodus exul ) . Retrieved February 14, 2015.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Chris Doughty, Nicholas Day & Andrew Plant: Birds of the Solomons, Vanuatu & New Caledonia, A & C Black, 1999, p. 128
- ^ Ernst Mayr: Birds collected during the Whitney South Sea Expedition. 47, Notes on the genera Halcyon, Turdus and Eurostopodus . American Museum novitates; no.1152, 1941
- ^ SL Olson & J.-C. Balouet: Fossil Birds from Late Quaternary Deposits in New Caledonia In: Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology. Number 469.Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC, 1989
- ↑ Cleere, Nigel; Nurney, Dave (1998), Nightjars: A Guide to Nightjars and Related Nightbirds , Mountfield, East Sussex: Pica Press
- ↑ H. Jourdan (1997): Are serpentine biota free from successful biological invasions? Southern New Caledonian ant community example. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Serpentine Ecology (eds T. Jaffré, RD Reeves & T. Becquer) pp. 107-108. ORSTOM, Nouméa.