Arabian Ostrich - Extinction

Extinction

The widespread introduction of firearms and, later, motor vehicles marked the start of the decline towards extinction of this subspecies. Earlier hunting methods with bow, arrows and dogs had allowed most animals of a group to escape, but rifles enabled poaching and excessive game hunting to diminish the species into extinction. By the early 20th century, the Arabian Ostrich had become rare. Its main stronghold was the northern Nefud northwards to the Syrian Desert, between latitudes 34°N and 25°N and longitude 38°E eastwards to the Euphrates Valley, and it was most plentiful in Al Jawf Province, where it associated with herds of the Saudi Gazelle and the Arabian Oryx, both also extinct or very rare, respectively, nowadays. Some of the last sightings include an individual east of the Tall al-Rasatin at the Jordanian-Iraqi border in 1928, a bird shot and eaten by pipeline workers in the area of Jubail in the early 1940s (some sources specifically state 1941), two apocryphal records of birds suffering the same fate in 1948, and a dying individual found in the upper Wadi el-Hasa north of Petra in 1966. Remains of old eggs are still found in the former range of the southern subpopulation, which disappeared between the 1900s and the 1920s, probably mainly because of increasing aridity. Some eggshell fragments were collected by St. John Philby from Mahadir Summan, Arabia around 1931. Following analyses of mtDNA control region haplotypes that confirmed the close relationship of the Arabian and the North African subspecies, a reintroduction project using S. c. camelus was set up in Saudi Arabia. Today the Somali Ostrich is re-introduced from captivity to the open areas of the Negev in Israel where the Arabian Ostrich lived before.