page_title: Coues's gadwall
section_title: Status and extinction
hierarchical_section_title: Coues's gadwall / Status and extinction
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: NASA-Astronautenbild der Insel Teraina, Kiribati, im Pazifischen Ozean English: NASA astronaut image of Teraina (Washington Island), Line Islands, Kiribati
context_page_description: Coues's gadwall or the Washington Island gadwall, is an extinct dabbling duck which is only known by two immature specimens from the Pacific island of Teraina, Line Islands, Kiribati. They are in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.. The bird was named in honor of Elliott Coues.
context_section_description: The status of this bird is controversial. While many scientists consider it a dwarf subspecies of the common gadwall (Anas strepera strepera) others argue that the two individuals might have been just juveniles of a local breeding population that might not even have been taxonomically distinct. The common gadwall is a known vagrant to the Tuamotu Islands (Kolbe wrote "Tahiti which is a misreading of Greenway) and Hawaii for example, which are about the same distance from the species' breeding grounds, as is Teraina (which, moreover, lies in between these two groups). This makes it entirely possible that the two Coues's gadwalls that were shot were just the offspring of a few vagrant common gadwalls, maybe settling there after being wounded by hunters. On the other hand, Streets' reports suggest that there was a population of these ducks of some size present, and thus they may have lived there for quite some time and indeed be worthy of recognition as a distinct taxon.
  The observations of the two individuals took place in January 1874. The subspecies' description was by Thomas Hale Streets (1847–1925) in 1876. Streets reported about the two immatures he shot, which were found in a peat bog.
  The cause of its extinction might be the extensive hunting by settlers of Tabuaeran (Fanning Island), which had shot large numbers of migrant ducks on both Teraina and Tabuaeran each year. W. G. Anderson, a local resident stated in 1926 that growing up on Teraina and Tabueran around the turn of the century, he had never encountered a native population of gadwalls on Teraina. Thus, the subspecies' disappearance can be fixed to the last quarter of the 19th century, between the mid-1870s and 1900.
caption: Teraina (Washington Island)
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