Every few years the IUCN publishes a number, and every few years the number is bigger. In October 2025 it was this: of the 172,620 species that have been assessed for the Red List, 48,646 are threatened with extinction [1]. More than one in four. The slender-billed curlew, a bird that once migrated through Europe, was declared extinct in the same update.
I read those numbers the way most people do. I nod, I feel something for about four seconds, and then the number is too big to hold and I move on.
So I did what I usually do when something is too big: I made it small enough to fit on a page.
The Maluku page
I am half Moluccan. My father's father came to the Netherlands from the islands in 1951, with the KNIL soldiers and their families who were told it was temporary. I have written about that before. It means that when I look at a world map, there is one cluster of islands east of Sulawesi that my eye goes to first, whatever the map is about.
So I asked a simple question: of those 48,646 species, which ones have actually been seen in Maluku?
That turns out to be answerable. GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, collects observation and museum records from all over the world and carries the Red List category for each species. You can ask it for every record inside the provinces of Maluku and Maluku Utara, keep only the species the IUCN lists as critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable, and you get a list [2].
The list has 276 names on it.
I built a page for it. It looks like a naturalist's cabinet, because that is what it is: drawers for birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, corals, plants. Pull a drawer, pick a card, and a chart of the islands shows you the dots where somebody wrote the animal down. It has its own page, the Maluku cabinet, and it refreshes itself from GBIF every week.
What is in the drawers
A few things surprised me.
The plants outnumber everything. More than half of the 276 are trees and other plants, most without an English name. Nutmegs you have never heard of. Figs. A Myristica here, an Elaeocarpus there, each known from a handful of specimens. The spice islands are still, quietly, full of spice trees nobody is counting.
The corals are a drawer of their own. Seventy threatened species of stony coral, most of them Acropora, the staghorns and table corals that build the reefs. They are on the list for the same reason reefs are on it everywhere: warming water and bleaching.
Amboyna-wood is endangered. Pterocarpus indicus, the tree whose burl wood carries the old name of Ambon into furniture catalogues around the world, is listed as endangered [2]. A tree named after the island, running out on the island.
The cockatoos. The salmon-crested cockatoo, Cacatua moluccensis, lives only on Seram and the islands around it. It has been on CITES Appendix I since 1989, which means international trade in wild-caught birds is prohibited; at the height of the trapping, more than 6,000 birds a year were being taken out of the forest for the cage trade [3]. The IUCN now lists it as endangered [2]. The white cockatoo of Halmahera is in the same drawer, with the same status.
A monarch on one small island. The black-chinned monarch, a small flycatcher, is critically endangered because it lives on Boano, one island off the western tip of Seram, and nowhere else [2]. Forty-six records in the whole database. That is the kind of species that disappears without anyone outside the island noticing.
The scrubfowl. The Moluccan scrubfowl, Eulipoa wallacei, is the best-recorded bird in the cabinet, and its story is the most Moluccan one. It is a megapode: it does not sit on its eggs. At night it walks down to a sunlit sandy beach, digs, lays an egg that weighs a fifth of its own body, buries it, and leaves the sun to do the rest. The two big nesting beaches that remain are at Kailolo on Haruku, an island I can see from Ambon on the map, and at Galela on Halmahera [4]. On Haruku the egg harvest is run by the village, with parts of the beach closed during the laying season, and some of the eggs go to a hatchery so that more chicks make it out [4][5]. The threats are not exotic: sand being dug up for roads, and litter [4].
That last one stayed with me. A bird that trusts a beach, and a village that has been managing that trust for longer than the Red List has existed.
What the cabinet cannot tell you
I want to be honest about what this page is and is not.
It is a list of species that somebody recorded and uploaded. A drawer tells you where people looked at least as much as where the animals are. The sperm whale is in the cabinet because of one record. The dugong, one record. The leatherback turtle, two. Nobody believes there is exactly one sperm whale in the Banda Sea. And there are species that are certainly in Maluku and not in the cabinet, because no record of them has made it to GBIF.
The cards do carry the CITES appendix where there is one, from the CITES Species+ database: Appendix I means commercial trade in wild specimens is banned, II means it needs permits. The salmon-crested cockatoo and the dugong are Appendix I; the reef-building corals are Appendix II, every one of them. What the cards do not show yet is the IUCN's own account of why a species is in trouble; that needs a token I still have to add.
So treat it as what it is: a page of the ledger, for one place, with the sources on every card. If you know the islands and you see something wrong, tell me.
Why bother
Because 48,646 is not a number anyone can care about, and the black-chinned monarch is.
Because the spice that pulled the ships to these islands five hundred years ago is still growing there, and the trees are now on a list.
And because the Moluccan part of me has spent a lot of time looking at that cluster of islands on maps that were about other things. This time the map is about them.
Sources
- IUCN, Arctic seals threatened by climate change, birds decline globally – IUCN Red List, press release, 10 October 2025. https://iucn.org/press-release/202510/arctic-seals-threatened-climate-change-birds-decline-globally-iucn-red-list
- GBIF occurrence and species records for the provinces Maluku (GADM IDN.19_1) and Maluku Utara (IDN.18_1), IUCN Red List categories as carried by GBIF, collected 7 November 2026. https://www.gbif.org
- World Parrot Trust, Moluccan Cockatoo (encyclopedia and project pages). https://parrots.org/encyclopedia/moluccan-cockatoo and https://parrots.org/projects/moluccan-cockatoo
- BirdLife International, Moluccan Scrubfowl (Eulipoa wallacei), Red List justification and threats. https://datazone.birdlife.org/species/factsheet/moluccan-scrubfowl-eulipoa-wallacei/text
- Argeloo, M. & Dekker, R.W.R.J., Exploitation of megapode eggs in Indonesia: the role of traditional methods in the conservation of megapodes, Oryx 30(1), 1996. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/33CD3F0ED1C82B4518947A36D1C5EC51/S0030605300021396a.pdf