Wanted: Twitchers to find Europe's rarest bird

By Silvia Aloisi

ROME (Reuters) - Birdwatchers the world over, here's a challenge for you.

Conservationists launched a global quest on Thursday for the slender-billed curlew, the rarest bird in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, which was last spotted in Oman in 1999.

They want birdwatchers to help find out whether the bird still exists -- and are handing out a toolkit complete with pictures, a map of the most recent sightings and a recording of the bird's call to make identification easier.

"This is the Holy Grail of birdwatching. We need to find it before it's too late to save it," said Nicola Crockford of Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, one of the main conservation groups behind the campaign.

"Next winter we will have the first ever comprehensive international survey to find the bird -- it will stretch all the way from Morocco right the way through to Iran, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Middle East," she told Reuters in an interview.

Besides deploying an army of professional bird counters to the wetlands where the bird may still survive, Crockford is asking volunteer birdwatchers to join the search -- and is even thinking of offering a reward.

"It is just possible that small numbers of the bird may still be wintering in an isolated part of North Africa or the Middle East, or that some unknown nesting site may be discovered in the depths of central Asia," she said.

The crow-sized bird, also known as Numenius tenuirostris, used to be seen regularly and in large flocks -- it was regarded as very common in some areas of the Mediterranean. Its only known breeding ground is in Siberia.  Continued...