This small, striped-headed curlew is the only North American shorebird that may be lost to us, its extirpation probably due to drastic over hunting, habitat alteration, and the extinction of a grasshopper, one of its primary prey species.

Perhaps extinct; rare sightings continued to be reported to the end of the twentieth century, but the last unequivocably documented records were photos taken in Texas in the spring of 1962 and a bird shot by a hunter in Barbados in the fall of 1963.