Spectacled Cormorant (Urile perspicillatus)
Posted on 31 December, 1840 in Extinct
Year Last Seen:
1840
Comments:
This species was known from Russia's Komandorski Islands, but is now Extinct: the last records date from the 1840s and the species is thought to have been lost by the early 1850s. Hunting was the primary cause of its extinction.
Habitat:
It inhabited rocky coasts and fed in adjacent seas.
Causes:
It was a poor flier (Livezey 1992) and was heavily hunted for food by the Aleuts from the 1820s onward (Hume 2017).
Distribution:
Urile perspicillatus was restricted to Bering Island in the Komandorski Islands, Russia (Greenway 1967), and possibly the adjacent coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula (Siegel-Causey et al. 1991). Steller noted that it was common in 1741, but its breeding islands were colonised by people in 1826 and all five known specimens were collected between 1840-1850; in 1882, Stejneger was told by the island's residents that the last birds had disappeared about 30 years before (Greenway 1967).