Curator of vertebrates Alan Tennyson discusses another previously unknown New Zealand bird extinction, published in a new article today.
Last month it was revealed that New Zealand had lost its unique swan in prehistoric times.
That list of extinctions continues to grow at an alarming rate as research, led by an Otago University team, published today reveals that New Zealand lost yet another bird in recent times – this time a shag.
New Zealand is the centre of global diversity for seabirds and we have more shags (also known as cormorants) than anywhere else (13 species).
The king shag is our rarest shag species. It is restricted to the Marlborough Sounds and classified as Nationally Endangered, with a global population of only a few hundred birds.
It had long been known that bones of a species similar to the king shag can be found as far away as the top of the North Island but new DNA research, based on museum specimens, has now revealed that these bones were not from king shags but from an entirely unknown species – named today as Leucocarbo septentrionalis, the kohatu shag.
The name kohatu comes from the phrase ‘Te ao kohatu’, meaning ‘from the stone age before our time’ and was suggested by Northland’s Ngāti Kuri, as the bones were found in their rohe.
We know very little about this newly described extinct species. So far only a handful of its bones have been found in coastal dunes. These bones date back in age a few thousand years and, based on the history of better known extinct birds like moa, it can be assumed that the kohatu shag was hunted to extinction in prehistoric times.
As the extinct species was closely related to the king shag, both species probably looked quite similar but the bones show that the kohatu shag was slightly smaller.
The kohatu shag is New Zealand’s fourth known recently-extinct seabird – it joins the Waitaha penguin, Scarlett’s shearwater, and Imber’s petrel. The new discovery brings the total number of recently-extinct New Zealand birds to 56 and, unfortunately, it seems certain that on-going research will increase this number even further.
Read the full research paper
I'm a Curator of Vertebrates at New Zealand's national museum - Te Papa. My main research interests relate to the biogeography of New Zealand's biota, extinction, bird palaeontology, bird taxonomy, and population monitoring and conservation of seabirds.
Shag remains, previously identified by Trevor Worthy as NZ King shag but likely to be this species are present in an early 15th century archaeological site on Tiritiri Matangi Island. This provides evidence of predation of the species by Maori.
Thanks Barbara – studying ancient DNA is allowing us to re-examine a lot of questions about relationships of recently extinct birds. We have several other similar projects in progress, for example, looking at the penguin fossils from the Chatham Islands.
Thanks for this, and the links to earlier posts on recently extinct birds. Very sad, and important to spread the word on this. I wonder what else will be revealed by the newer DNA techniques?