Alex works for BirdLife International as a Senior Red List Officer, leading the organisation’s IUCN Red List assessments for Asia. He is the BirdLife lead for Search for Lost Birds, helping each year to curate the updated list of lost bird species. He has published extensively on avian conservation, extinction risk and taxonomy, with a particular interest in the world’s most poorly known birds. Alex also sits on the BirdLife Taxonomic Working Group and is a Scientific Associate of the UK’s Natural History Museum.
Around the world, more than 100 species of birds are currently considered “lost” — not declared extinct, but with no confirmed records for more than a decade. Some have gone unseen for more than 150 years. The Search for Lost Birds, a partnership between American Bird Conservancy, BirdLife International, Re:wild and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, works to track these species, support expeditions to find them, and clarify their status before it is too late.
In this talk, he will tell the story of the project five years on: how many lost birds have been rediscovered, which rediscoveries have been the most surprising, and how many species have sadly been confirmed extinct. He will take the audience behind the scenes of recent searches and show how the hunt for a single lost bird can deliver much wider conservation gains. Finally, he will look ahead to the approximately 100 species still waiting to be found and explore which of them might be rediscovered next—perhaps even by someone in the audience.!
