Humans Erased More Than 10% Of World's Bird Species During Colonization Of The Pacific Islands

One of the survivors: the Takahē, a flightless rail from New Zealand. Photo by: © ZSL.

Around 4,000 years ago intrepid Polynesian seafarers made their way into an untamed wilderness: the far-flung Pacific Islands. Over a thousands or so years, they rowed from one island to another, stepping on shores never yet seen by humans. While this vast colonization brought about a new era of human history, it also ended the existence of well-over a thousand bird species according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Scientists have long known that the arrival of people on these remote wildernesses brought about extinctions—such as the duck-like moa-nalos in Hawaii—but have had difficulty estimating the full-scale of the avian extinction.

"Relatively few fossils have been collected from most islands that have been studied," the scientists write. "Consequently, many extinct bird species remain to be discovered, confounding attempts to quantify more precisely the number and type of species lost across the region." But employing sophisticated modeling techniques, a team of international scientists were able to bridge the gaps in the fossil record and estimate just how many bird species may have vanished.

"We studied fossils from 41 tropical Pacific islands and using new techniques we were able to gauge how many extra species of bird disappeared without leaving any trace," explains co-author Tim Blackburn, Director of the Zoological Society of London's (ZSL) Institute of Zoology. "If we take into account all the other islands in the tropical Pacific, as well as seabirds and songbirds, the total extinction toll is likely to have been around 1,300 bird species."


EDIT

http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0325-hance-bird-extinction-pacific.html