Endangered
Réunion Harrier
Circus maillardi
Réunion Harrier is a bird in the family Accipitridae (order Accipitriformes) — Circus maillardi, recorded as Endangered and tied to Réunion.
Appearance
The male has a blackish head and back with white streaks. The underparts, underwings and rump are white and the tail is grey. The wings are grey and black with a white leading edge.
It is about 42–55 cm long. The female is around 3–15% larger than the male.
Range and habitat
It is now found only on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, although fossil material from Mauritius has been referred to this species. The Malagasy harrier (C. Macrosceles) of Madagascar and the Comoro Islands was previously treated as a subspecies of this bird but is increasingly regarded as a separate species.
Some research in recent years have shown that the biggest threat to the Réunion harrier on the island is rodenticide. Anticoagulant rodenticides (AR) are widely used on Réunion Island to prevent rats and house mice from transmitting leptospirosis transmission to humans and limit their damage to sugarcane crops.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
This type of bird is more commonly found in native and degraded lowland evergreen forests during the breeding season. It breeds between January and May and lays two or three white eggs in a nest on the ground.
Nowadays, its recipe includes many introduced mammals (rats, mice, Tenrecs, etc.), but it used to feed mainly on birds and insects. It has a number of adaptations that are unusual among harriers: broad rounded wings for hunting between trees and a short tarsus and long claws, that are common among those birds of prey that feed on other birds.
In crisis
The Réunion harrier appears to be declining in numbers and it is classed as an endangered species. Even so, rodenticides put rodent predators, such as the Réunion Harrier, at high risk of secondary poisoning. The number of harriers exposed to AR and the number of individuals who may be poisoned increased with time.
Poaching and persecution (it was considered a predator of chickens and was previously considered an ominous bird), along with rodenticides, pose the most serious threat at present. Below 1300 meters above sea level, farming and urbanization have eliminated all native forests except the steepest mountain slopes, while hurricanes, rainstorm and fires may damage the remaining habitats, and exotic plants are increasingly damaging forests.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Réunion Harrier is 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 Réunion Harrier, Wikidata item Q1264118. 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.
