Talk:Canary Islands oystercatcher

Birds Low‑importance

Canary Islands oystercatcher is part of WikiProject Birds, an attempt at creating a standardized, informative and easy-to-use ornithological resource. If you would like to participate, visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks. Please do not substitute this template.BirdsWikipedia:WikiProject BirdsTemplate:WikiProject Birdsbird

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(<strike>~~strike through~~</strike> when done)

Check description reference
Check Bannerman's seminal work Birds of the Canary Islands which should hold good field data.
Reread references not as inline quote: (author(s) date) and check literature mentioned in Hockey (1982, 1987) and Álamo Tavío (1975).
Other papers might have been in Journal für Ornithologie in the latter 19th/early 20th century when sp. was still reasonably easy to find, and more recently (1980s/1990s) in (bird) conservation journals, maybe also BBOC (Bannerman), Ostrich (Hockey).
There may be some Spanish doctoral or postgraduate work; possibly mid-1990s; might want to check Ardeola (journal).

Information on reproduction is fairly shaky; much can be conjectured but things like clutch size (not verified, but plausible) stand out as peculiar.

Dysmorodrepanis 22:16, 11 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Addressing citations in Extinction section

In this section, I have added citations where possible and in-line "citation needed" tags to help clarify which remaining points are not clearly supported. I removed some claims which seemed to be contradicted by the evidence, namely that the birds were hunted (presumably would have been documented in sources like IUCN if this was significant) and that the eggs harvested in large quantities as a food source (which seems difficult to reconcile with the eggs being unknown to science). Magpie7533 (talk) 07:25, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Note on need for information from Spanish-language sources

As I was working to add in-line citations to the article, I found that much of the knowledge of this species comes from sources in Spanish (the comment on this talk page nearly 20 years ago by Dysmorodrepanis was prescient!). In particular, the 2013 monograph "Ostrero canario: historia y biología de la primera especie de la fauna española extinguida por el hombre" by Arturo Valledor de Lozoya (link currently available) and the references therein is an invaluable resource. There is a ton of information here which seems to have been overlooked by English-language scholarship, including on behavior, vocalization, eggs, and specimen history. Much of this is lacking even from typically-authoritative sources like Birds of the World (doi link).

I have done my best to pull relevant information using Google Translate and my extremely limited Spanish knowledge--but I hope a future editor who is fluent in Spanish or has access to better translation services can build off of this! Magpie7533 (talk) 08:56, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]