One third of the world's most threatened birds are losing the fight for survival despite a campaign launched three years ago to protect them.
Sao Tome's maroon pigeon, the black-faced spoonbill of East Asia and the wattled crane of Southern Africa are among 400 species identified by BirdLife International in a report on Monday as still being neglected.
"State of the World's Birds presents firm evidence that we are losing birds and other biodiversity at an alarming and ever-increasing rate," BirdLife director Michael Rands said.
But there was good news too. In the three years since the BirdLife action plan was launched, nearly a quarter of threatened bird species such as Morocco's bald ibis have shown a marked recovery, the report said.
Rands said BirdLife was helping set up initiatives to protect around 40 percent of threatened birds, but said it needed support from others, particularly governments.
But measures need not be expensive and unwieldy government actions. They can be simple and taken at a local level, a spokesman for Britain's Royal Society for the Protection of Birds told Reuters.
Japan's short-tailed albatross, once believed extinct, has seen a marked recovery in numbers to some 1,200 pairs since being rediscovered in the 1950s and given habitat protection.
Likewise the Vanuatu Island megapode, a chicken-like bird with a population of around 5,000, experienced a recovery in numbers after islanders agreed to ration their egg collecting.