The Druridge Bay curlew was a curlew that was present in Druridge Bay, Northumberland in May 1998, whose species identification proved to be controversial. The bird was identified by its finder, and most others who saw it, as a first-summer slender-billed curlew, one of the rarest birds in the world; however, this identification provoked scepticism from some quarters. The bird was accepted as this species (and therefore became the first record of slender-billed curlew in Britain) by the British Birds Rarities Committee and the British Ornithologists’ Union Records Committee and subsequently rejected in 2013 (Collinson et al 2014), as it identification could not been established as a Slender-billed Curlew.