At the end of last year, BirdLife released its yearly update to birds on the IUCN Red List of threatened species: the result of months of hard work from our science team as they collated the latest research into up-to-date assessments of species’ extinction risks.
Every year, species are shuttled up and down the scale, with some being ‘uplisted’ to higher threat categories – a cause for concern – and others successfully ‘downlisted’ to lower threat categories. Knowing where a species stands on the road to extinction can help us to focus our action where it is most needed – or, conversely, to learn which conservation measures are working well.
In this most recent update, Asia’s big forest birds made the headlines, driven ever closer towards extinction by hunting and habitat loss. But there were plenty of other stories – both positive and negative – that flew under the radar. Here are just a few.
