Tag
Endemics: birds found nowhere else, and what that costs them
Species confined to one island or one region. A restricted range makes a bird distinctive and makes it fragile, and most of the recovery programmes covered on this site concern birds in this category.
- The Cahow: a petrel that was extinct for 300 years
The Bermuda Petrel was written off in the seventeenth century and rediscovered in 1951. Reaching a hundred nesting pairs took another sixty years.
- The Echo Parakeet: from a dozen birds back to a population
In the 1980s the Echo Parakeet was reduced to a handful of individuals on Mauritius. What it took to reverse that, and why the recovery is instructive.
- Mangrove Finch: the rarest of Darwin's finches
A Galápagos finch reduced to two small mangrove patches on one island, and a parasitic fly that kills nestlings faster than the birds can replace them.
- Puerto Rican Tody: the San Pedrito and the family it belongs to
A six-gram green and red endemic most visitors hear before they see. What the Puerto Rican Tody is, and why todies live only in the Caribbean.