Mauritius Kestrel (Falco punctatus)
Pink Pigeon (Columba [formerly Nesoenas] mayeri)
Echo Parakeet (Psittacula eques echo)
When I think of these birds, I think of Carl Jones. If he had not gone to Mauritius (an island nation off the coast of Africa), it is more than possible that all three species would be extinct, for he has led the fight to save them—even when, at times, it must have seemed a daunting, if not impossible, task.
It took me some time to track Carl down at his home in Wales, where he spends time when he is neither in the field nor at the offices of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in Jersey. We had a long conversation by telephone, and although I would have preferred to meet him in person, Carl’s warmth and his love for his work are so genuine, his enthusiasm so infectious, that I feel I have known him for a long time. I learned that he is very interested in bird psychology and that he lives on a small holding with his family that includes some parrots, an eagle—and a tame condor that is imprinted on humans and treats Carl as his partner! Carl told me that he shares my belief that not only is it okay for a scientist to feel empathy with the animals he studies, it’s in fact necessary for real understanding.
The three stories I want to share together represent a heroic struggle, ultimately successful, to save three very different species from extinction—a falcon, a pigeon, and a parakeet. By the late 1970s when Carl stepped in, all three of these species had been critically endangered for many years and were on the very brink of extinction: There were only four Mauritius falcons in the world, only ten or eleven pink pigeons, and around twelve echo parakeets.
Carl’s fondest memories are of the many seasons that he worked with Mauritius kestrels in their last home, the Black River Gorges. At that time, he told me, much of his life revolved around this small, charismatic falcon. It is just under a foot in length, with the male weighing only about 4.7 ounces—smaller than the 6.3-ounce female. They have pure white underparts with round or heart-shaped spots. “For me,” Carl said, “they were the most beautiful of birds, and I used to get very excited when I just got a glimpse of one. They have distinctive rounded wings and are very maneuverable. They weave in and out of the forest canopy chasing and feeding on the bright red and green day geckos that are their main prey.
“They used to ride the updrafts from the sides of the cliffs, rising hundreds of feet, and then just close their wings to plummet earthward, hurtling vertically downward at great speed,” he continued. “Sometimes they would pull out of their stoop and just land gently on a tree or on the cliff; more usually they used the momentum to shoot upward again.”
As the breeding season approached, they became more and more aerial, Carl told me. “They would chase each other around and fly in the most beautiful ‘sky dances,’ rising and falling in gentle undulations or in jagged zigzags. Often they would just rise in the sky on a thermal, flying around together and calling until sometimes this courtship display culminated in mating in their nest cavity.” Although Carl was talking of his experiences of some thirty years ago, he told me, “I cannot think about these early observations of the kestrels without a flush of excitement and a quickening of the pulse.”
The Mauritius kestrel had been pushed to the verge of extinction as a result of severe deforestation during the eighteenth century—accelerated by the devastating effects of cyclones, predation from invasive species (especially crab-eating macaques, mongooses, cats, and rats), and the 1950s and 1960s use of pesticides, especially DDT, for malaria control and food crop protection.
In 1973, the Mauritius government had agreed to the capture of one of the last pairs of these falcons for an attempt at captive breeding—which failed. One chick was born but it died when the incubator broke down, and subsequently the female died as well. By the following year, there were only four Mauritius kestrels remaining in the wild, and it was considered the rarest bird in the world.
It was in 1979 that Carl started his work on Mauritius, under the auspices of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. He became the sixth biologist in as many years to work with the kestrels. Although he was only twenty-four years old, he had spent many years keeping and rehabilitating injured birds. Fresh from college with a degree in biology and knowledge of recent advances in breeding falcons in captivity, he had, he told me, “the enthusiasm and arrogance of youth.” He had seen breeding success with injured common kestrels in his parents’ garden and was sure that he could save this the rarest of all birds where others had failed.
Carl knew that common kestrels, like so many birds, will lay again if their first clutch is removed, and he determined to try the technique on the wild Mauritius kestrels. He had to climb steep cliffs to reach the “nests”—shallow depressions, or scrapes, in the substrate—of each of the two breeding pairs to take their eggs.
“The first nest was on a relatively small cliff, and I could get to it by using an extension ladder,” he said. “I found that the kestrel had laid its eggs at the back of a small cave about two meters deep. I crawled in and took the three eggs and placed them carefully in a widemouthed insulated flask that had been preheated to the correct incubation temperature.” From there they went to an incubator at the government’s captive breeding center, about five miles away.
The second nest was on a high cliff, and Carl had to be lowered down to it on a rope. “The eggs were deep in a narrow cavity that opened up into a nest chamber about four feet into the rock, and the only way I could reach them was by attaching a spoon to a long stick. The eggs had been laid in the remains of a dead tropicbird and were in a bed of soft white feathers.” Those eggs soon joined the others in the breeding center.
Because the species was so close to extinction, this was a tense time, and Carl camped on the incubator room floor to be close by in case anything went wrong. Four of the eggs hatched, and he hand-reared the chicks “on minced mouse and minced quail.” All four fledged, and since the double-clutching technique had worked so well, it was repeated in subsequent years. Thus a captive population was built up, and these birds subsequently bred successfully. Gradually the total number increased.
In 1984, Carl took a chick from the captive breeding center and put it in the nest of one of the wild kestrels, Suzie. She reared it successfully, and it became the first captive-born individual to return to freedom. Subsequently captive-bred and -raised birds were released into areas where there was suitable habitat but no kestrels.
In 1985, Carl was able to announce the fiftieth successful hatching at the breeding center from captive-laid and wild-harvested eggs. And by 1991, as a result of double-clutching in the wild and captive populations, artificial insemination, and successful raising of incubator-hatched chicks, two hundred Mauritius kestrels had been successfully bred. By the end of the 1993–1994 breeding season, 333 birds had been released to the wild.
Meanwhile Carl and the DWCT, working with the Mauritius government, were continuing their work with the wild population. Supplementary food was provided, and the birds were offered—and used—nest boxes. Strict predator control served to reduce numbers of introduced predators, and work on habitat restoration was begun. This meant that captive-bred and -reared birds released into the wild had a good chance of survival. Indeed, in the early 1990s the kestrel population was judged to be self-sustaining, and, said Carl, “the captive breeding program was closed down, the job was complete, and the kestrel was saved.” Indeed, recent studies have shown that there are probably more than a hundred breeding pairs and a total of about five to six hundred birds. Kestrel lovers—raise your glasses to the success of this effort!
Most people think of pigeons as pests. We all know the overfed birds that strut unconcerned along the pavements of busy cities, congregate around people eating in the park, and deface the walls of buildings on which they roost. Forget all that. The pink pigeon is a beautiful, medium-size pigeon with a delicate pink breast, pale head, and foxy red tail.
“This stunning bird,” said Carl, “had been rare for probably two centuries or more and for a while was thought extinct.” Then in the 1970s, a tiny population of about twenty-five to thirty birds was found surviving in a small grove of trees high on a mountainside that had one of the highest rates of rainfall in Mauritius—about fifteen feet per year. They lived there, Carl told me, not because they liked it but because the number of predators was low in this wet and often cold habitat. But even there their numbers were declining due to habitat destruction and degradation, and because of introduced monkeys and rats that raided the nests and ate the eggs and young. Feral cats killed adult birds as well.
By 1990, there were only ten or eleven known individual pink pigeons left in the wild, and it appeared that the tiny population was in terminal decline. Fortunately in the mid-1970s, a team from the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust had captured a group of pigeons for a captive breeding program run by Carl. He had studied this group for his PhD degree.
“They were a real challenge to breed,” he told me. “They were very fussy about their mates, and to find compatible pairs was a real headache.” With small populations, of course, it is important to manage the genetic diversity and to prevent the mating of closely related individuals. But, said Carl, “It was common for the birds to reject the partners that you felt were most appropriate and then try and pair up with their first cousin or even a sibling! Sometimes I felt like a pink pigeon marriage guidance counselor… a compatible breeding pair might breed and then one day there would be a huge bust-up and one would be beating up the other and they would have to be separated.”
Despite the problems, the pigeons started breeding. But then they proved to be such poor parents that the eggs and young had to be reared under domestic doves. In time, however, by allowing them to practice rearing young doves, Carl was able to improve their parental skills. And so, finally, with the pink pigeons breeding and raising their young at Black River, Carl and his team developed a program for releasing them back into their native forest.
Under Carl’s supervision, a young Englishwoman, Kirsty Swinnerton, pitched a tent in the forest and monitored their progress for five years. It soon became obvious that they faced a variety of problems. First, especially at certain times of the year, there was very little appropriate food in the forest, much being eaten by introduced monkeys, rats, and birds. This meant that supplementary food needed to be provided. Second, when the reintroduced pigeons started to breed, several of them were killed by feral cats, necessitating increased predator control. But when these problems had been addressed, the original released population gradually began to increase so that eventually it was possible to establish several other populations. And in 2008, Carl told me, there were nearly four hundred free-living pink pigeons divided among six different populations. “This species is now secure,” he said.
Having attained considerable success with the Mauritius kestrel and pink pigeon, Carl turned his attention to what was then the world’s rarest parrot—the beautiful emerald-green echo parakeet. It is the last of the three or four species of parrots that once lived on Mauritius, and the last of perhaps as many as seven parakeet species once found on the islands of the western Indian Ocean.
In the 1700s and early 1800s, the echo parakeet was very common in Mauritius and Reunion Island in upper- and mid-altitude forests and in the scrublands—the so-called dwarf forest—feeding on fruit and flowers in the upper branches and nesting in holes in the trees. The Reunion population disappeared first, and between the 1870s and the 1900s the population in Mauritius gradually fell. This was due primarily to habitat loss and competition from introduced species. Fortunately in 1974, and as a result of growing awareness, the remaining forest was given almost total protection, and a significant nature reserve was created by linking smaller protected forests. But for a while, it seemed that this move had come too late—the tiny population of echo parakeets was having limited nesting success.
In 1979, when Carl was spending a lot of time in and around the Black River Gorges with his kestrels, he occasionally saw small flocks of the parakeets on the ridges surrounding the gorges. They were, he said, tame and confiding, and because they sometimes fed only a few feet away from him, he got to know them individually. But they were disappearing fast: By the 1980s, there were only eight to twelve known individuals left, of which only three were females—although Carl says it is possible that several birds had been overlooked.
Since these parakeets were island residents, facing similar problems to the birds of New Zealand, Don Merton was invited to help the effort to save them from extinction. Drawing on his considerable experience and working closely with Carl, he devised and helped implement the recovery strategy. First, they initiated a study to get to the bottom of the parakeets’ nesting problems. They found that when the parakeets did breed, the chicks were attacked by nest flies that would in some years kill most if not all of them. This meant that nests had to be treated with insecticides. Another problem was tropicbirds taking over nest sites, so tropicbird-proof entrances had to be installed on suitable nest cavities. Rats also posed a great threat, sometimes eating both eggs and young. After two precious nests were lost to rats, the team stapled rings of smooth PVC plastic around the trunks of each nest tree and placed a bucket of poison nearby. One nest was attacked by a monkey, who grabbed a chick and wounded the mother. The team isolated nest trees by judicious pruning of the canopy so that monkeys could no longer jump in from neighboring trees. Then there were the seasonal food shortages—and so feeding hoppers were introduced (though it was many years before the birds learned to use them). Finally, nest cavities were made more secure and weatherproof.
The biologists found that though females typically laid three or four eggs, usually only one chick fledged. In other words, chicks were dying in almost all nests. Carl and his team decided that if there were more than two chicks in a nest, they would take the “surplus,” leaving the parents with a brood they could raise comfortably. If a pair failed to hatch any eggs, a “surplus” chick was given to them from another nest.
“In such intelligent birds as the echo parakeets,” Carl told me, “it is important for their psychological well-being that they are allowed to rear young. It is also important for the young to be reared in family groups.” This program of manipulation of nests also resulted in many surplus young being taken to the breeding center, where they were raised successfully.
The first three captive-bred birds were returned to the wild in 1997; others soon followed. But there were problems with these hand-reared birds. “Some were just too tame,” Carl told me. “When they saw you in the forest, they would fly down and land on your shoulder.” And they were very naive. Sometimes they landed near a cat or mongoose—and did not live to tell the tale. Carl spent a lot of time with these young birds, pondering their problem. He had been releasing them when they were seventeen weeks old, so he decided to try releasing the next youngsters at about nine to ten weeks—the time when they would normally fledge. The results were dramatic. “These younger birds integrated with the wild birds and learned their survival and social skills.”
Gabriella was one of the first three birds to be released. She mated with a wild male, Zip, and was the first captive-bred female to fledge a chick—Pippin. Gabriella had learned to use a feeding hopper in captivity and Zip, learning from her, became the first wild bird to use one.
In subsequent years, the number of birds taking supplemental food from the hoppers and using nest boxes provided by the team gradually increased, as did the number of breeding pairs. By 2006, it was decided to stop the intensive management of the wild birds, only continuing with the supplementary feeding and provision of nest boxes. In March 2008, I learned that there are about 360 free-living echo parakeets—and the population is still growing.
And so, the echo parakeet represents another species saved—although it will be necessary, said Carl, to continue with supplemental feeding and predator control. Skeptics maintain that a species cannot be deemed secure until it can live on its own, independent of human help. “But,” said Carl firmly, “in an increasingly modified world, we are going to have to look after and manage the wildlife if we want to keep it.” Alas, he is right. In a world so damaged by our human footprint, it is likely that we shall have to remain eternally vigilant to protect threatened and endangered species: They need all the help we can give them. It is the least we can do.
One of the most important projects on Mauritius, along with ongoing predator control, is the restoration of areas of native forest—a program in which the government’s National Parks and Conservation Service now plays a large part. As a result of the successes with the Mauritius kestrel, pink pigeon, and echo parakeet, the prime minister of Mauritius declared the Black River Gorges and surrounding areas Mauritius’s first national park—a haven “for the birds that have been saved to live.”