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Birdfinding.info ⇒ The St. Helena Petrel is known only from subfossil remains. It is believed to have gone extinct in the early 1500s, soon after Portuguese settlement of St. Helena began in 1513. The settlers inadvertently brought rats, which quickly multiplied to plague proportions so they released cats as a pest control measure about a decade later. The petrel’s extinction was likely overdetermined by introduction of two novel predators, each independently capable of extinguishing a burrow-nesting seabird.
St. Helena Petrel †
Pterodroma rupinarum
Extinct. Formerly bred on St. Helena in the South Atlantic.
The cause of extinction is not known, but the apparent swiftness of its decline and the correlation to settlement of the island tend to indicate either rats or the cats introduced to control them as the presumptive cause.
Identification
A mid-sized gadfly petrel whose closest relatives, as determined through genetic analysis, are the Cape Verde and Desertas Petrels. There appears to be no surviving evidence to provide details of its appearance.
Notes
Monotypic species.
IUCN Red List Status: Extinct.
References
BirdLife International. 2016. Pterodroma rupinarum. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T22728800A94996980. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2016-3.RLTS.T22728800A94996980.en. (Accessed October 6, 2020.)
Hume, J.P. 2017. Extinct Birds (Second Edition). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, London.
Welch, A.J., S.L. Olson, and R.C. Fleischer. 2014. Phylogenetic relationships of the extinct St Helena petrel, Pterodroma rupinarum Olson, 1975 (Procellariiformes: Procellariidae), based on ancient DNA. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 170:494-505.