Critically Endangered
Blue-billed Curassow
Crax alberti
Blue-billed Curassow is a bird in the family Cracidae (order Galliformes) — Crax alberti, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
Males are mostly black with a white vent and tail tip. Both sexes have an erectile crest, the male's black and the female's black and white.
The blue-billed curassow is 82.5 to 92.5 cm (2.7 to 3.0 ft) long and weighs 3.2 to 3.6 kg (7.1 to 7.9 lb).
Range and habitat
The blue-billed curassow is found only in northern Colombia. Its range used to stretch 106,700-square-kilometers. It now has a highly fragmented range, with small populations between La Guajira and Magdalena Departments south to Antioquia and Boyacá Departments with 2,090-square-kilometers. It inhabits undisturbed forest in the tropical and upper tropical zones, mostly from near sea level to 600 m (2,000 ft) but at least formerly as high as 1,200 m (3,900 ft).
The ProAves El Paujil Bird Reserve in Santander Department was created in 2003 especially to protect one population.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Its diet has not been extensively studied but it is known to include fruits, worms, and insects. The blue-billed curassow's breeding season spans from mid-December to early March.
It builds a large nest of sticks and dead leaves and conceals it in dense vine tangles.
In crisis
The IUCN has assessed the blue-billed curassow as Critically Endangered. Its population is estimated to be between 1,250 – 3,100 mature individuals and its population is fragmented and decreasing. Deforestation and hunting are the major threats.
One of the threats facing blue-billed curassows is habitat loss/fragmentation. Studied populations are not estimated to survive another 100 years as hunting has the greatest impact on the expected extinction date.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix III. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Blue-billed Curassow is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Blue-billed Curassow, Wikidata item Q1043334. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
