Critically Endangered
Masked Finfoot
Heliopais personatus
The masked finfoot or Asian finfoot is a highly endangered aquatic bird that was formerly distributed throughout the fresh and brackish wetlands of the eastern Indian subcontinent, Indochina, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Appearance
The masked finfoot is an underwater specialist with a long neck, a striking sharp beak, and lobed feet that are green. Both males and females have a black mask and eyebrow that contrasts with a white eyering and lateral cervical stripe. The rest of the neck is grey, the breast is pale and the back, wings, and tail are a rich brown.
Range and habitat
The masked finfoot can be found in a range of habitats across the eastern Indian subcontinent through to Malaysia and Indonesia in a variety of fresh to brackish wetlands, although due to habitat destruction it has disappeared from most of this range. This range includes forest, wooded savannah, flooded forest, and even mangrove swamps. The masked finfoot or Asian finfoot is a highly endangered aquatic bird that was formerly distributed throughout the fresh and brackish wetlands of the eastern Indian subcontinent, Indochina, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
In crisis
The masked finfoot was formerly considered endangered and declining with fragmented populations and fewer than 600–1,700 individuals in 2009, but a 2020 study in Forktail found the population to likely be between 100 and 300, far lower than the previous estimate. This likely indicates that the species should be updated to critically endangered on the IUCN Red List, and major steps towards its protection have to be taken to avoid it becoming Asia's next avian extinction. Definitive breeding populations are only known from 4 sites in Bangladesh and Cambodia, with potential breeding populations at six possible sites in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. The species has likely been extirpated from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore.
Major threats to the species are human disturbance and habitat loss in the low-lying forested wetlands that it inhabits.
Masked Finfoot 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 Masked Finfoot, Wikidata item Q606527. 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.
