Jerdon’s Courser, the pink-headed duck and the red-faced malkoha are among the Indian birds classified as either critically endangered or already extinct

New Delhi, July 4: The rate of extinction of birds around the world is likely to be higher than hitherto assumed and might soon touch 10 extinctions per year, biologists have said in a study.

At that rate, 1,250 species, or over 12 per cent of the world’s 9,799 known species of birds, might vanish by the end of the 21st century, US researchers said in their study analysing bird extinctions.

Stuart Pimm at Duke University and his colleagues have argued that the current estimate of one bird extinction every four years does not take into account the continual identification of extinct species from skeletal remains and missing species that have yet to be declared as extinct.

“Some species are probably extinct. There is reluctance to declare them so prematurely,” the researchers said in their study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The predominant cause of the endangerment of species has been habitat destruction, particularly the loss of tropical forests that harbour most of the world’s bird species, they said.

Six years ago, scientists had identified 25 “hotspots” around the world ? regions that have emerged as last exclusive habitats of certain species and suffer from over 70 per cent habitat destruction.

The new study points out that about 2,800 bird species are now found only in these 25 hotspots.

At the current rate of habitat loss there, “1,250 species are likely to go extinct this century”, the scientists said.

Since the year 1500, scientists have catalogued about 130 birds that have gone extinct ? a rate of about one bird extinction every four years.

The researchers said while most previous bird extinctions were on islands, increasing numbers of extinctions are now occurring on continents.

The dodo, the fish eagle, the serpent eagle, the Arabian ostrich, the dwarf emu, and several species of parakeets, owls and macaws are among the 130 birds catalogued as extinct.

Among birds in India, the Jerdon’s Courser, the pink-headed duck and the red-faced malkoha have been classified by ornithologists as either critically endangered or already extinct.

In rare instances, a species thought to be ‘extinct’ has been spotted after many years.

A Bombay Natural History Society expert had sighted Jerdon’s Courser in 1986, many years after it was thought to be extinct. Last month, an ornithologist spotted the Manipur Bush quail in Assam’s Manas National Park, 70 years after the last confirmed sighting of this bird.

Earlier this year, Birdlife International, a global alliance of conservation organisations, had calculated that among the 9,799 known species of birds, 1,210 species are threatened with extinction and another 795 are described as “near threatened species”.

Scientists believe that were it not for a number of conservation initiatives, another 25 species would have become extinct, including 10 species within the past decade.

The US researchers have cautioned that besides habitat loss, climate change and other factors may also accelerate extinction.

They point out that the accidental introduction of a tree snake in Guam led to the elimination of many of the island’s birds in a few decades.

Massive fishing in the oceans poses a “relatively new and very serious threat to three-quarters of the 21 albatross species”, Pimm and his colleagues said in their report.