A Malagasy Milestone

When the general public thinks about endangered species, they most often think of pandas, rhinos, elephants, and tigers.  Which is all fair enough.  The species that we are often in the greatest danger of losing to extinction, though, are the most obscure ones.  One of those is the rarest duck in the world, the Madagascar pochard - a species that is so rare that it was thought to be extinct for many years before being rediscovered on a single lake in 2006.  With its prospects in the wild looking dim, birds were taken into captivity by Durrell Wildlife Trust for an emergency breeding program.

That breeding program has born fruit (or, if you're a stickler for accuracy, eggs), and the time has come to fulfil the dreams of every zookeeper and restore a practically-extinct animal back to its rightful place in the wild.  Over the last few months, Durrell staff were able to take advantage of the brief dry season, when the lake that these birds inhabit(ed) was still accessible to vehicles, to return 35 Madagascar pochards to the wild.   This isn't the first release of this species that Durrell has performed, but it is the largest, and represents the best chance so far of this critically endangered duck re-establishing itself in the wild.

Congrats to Durrell Wildlife Trust and the Malagasy people for helping one of Madagascar's most endangered species take one more step back from the brink, an accomplishment which would have seemed impossible 20 years ago when the species was thought to be lost.  Hopefully the success will continue and more Durrell-bred pochards will be taking to the wing above Lake Sofia until the time comes when these zoo-bred reinforcements are no longer necessary.

A new milestone for the world's rarest duck