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THE WILSON JOURNAL OF ORNITHOLOGY • Vol 123, No. 3. September 2011 
limited” (Ridgely and Greenfield 2001:142), but 
specimen BMNH 1920.10.31.5, collected in 
September 1919 at Lake Mica in Antisana. has a 
label inscribed “Formerly very abundant but now 
rather scarce”. Today it is "rare and very local”, 
with probably fewer than 100 individuals, and 
"rather wary, doubtless in part because in many 
areas it is still hunted” (Ridgely and Greenfield 
2001:142). It is "widespread but uncommon” in 
Peru (Schulenberg et al. 2007:80), and it is this 
country which evidently now holds the key to the 
long-term survival of the species. It is hard to 
speculate on the size of the population in Peru, but 
with so much habitat apparently available we 
might expect numbers to be in four or five figures. 
Delany and .Scott (2006), while half-recognizing 
branickii as a species, ventured no estimate of its 
population size. 
CONSERVATION IMPLICATIONS 
Theristicus branickii and its upland habitat 
have several threats. The species is hunted in 
places (Ridgely and Greenfield 2001), and 
livestock have degraded vegetation and eroded 
soils in its puna habitat in Peru and Bolivia with 
mining activities now causing pollution (World 
Wildlife Fund 2010). Theristicus melanopis has 
an estimated generation length of 9.6 years 
(BirdLife International, unpubl. data). Assuming 
branickii is similarly long-lived, these threats 
have probably produced a population decline over 
the past three generations (the period used to 
assess population trends in the Red List criteria: 
IUCN 2001), i.e., the past 30 years. However, 
whether the decline rate approaches the threshold 
for listing as threatened (>30%) is unclear. A 
thorough assessment of the species’s conservation 
status is clearly warranted. 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
We thank Robert Prys-Jones (NHM). Patrick Bousses 
(MNHN), James Dean (USNM), Paul Sweet (AMNH) and 
Sylke Frahnert and Pascal Eckhoff (ZMB) for permission to 
examine specimens at their museums. We thank R. P. Clay 
for critically reading the manuscript, and two referees for 
their constructive guidance. 
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