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Imagine that you live in a desperately poor community where you earn less than one dollar per day? Then imagine that a stranger comes into the village and offers you the equivalent of a lifetime’s wage to show him where to find some tortoises.
What would you do? It is this very challenge that we face in the Baly Bay region of Madagascar that is home to the ploughshare tortoise, an animal that is highly sought after by the illegal pet trade. Animals can change hands for thousands of dollars and smuggling them out of the country is big business. Now there are fewer than 500 of these tortoises remaining and their habitat is disappearing rapidly.
Durrell monitors these animals in the wild, manages a long-term captive breeding programme and supports the government in its fight against smugglers.
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When you think about the animals that have had a great impact on the way in which we view the world, there are many potential contenders. Could it be the Coelacanth, the prehistoric fish that was found alive and well having survived since the Cretaceous Period. Or, could it be the chimpanzee that has taught us so much about language, intelligence and what it means to be human. Or, perhaps it is the small grey and white bird found on a single small island in the Pacific.
This particular little bird, the Floreana Mockingbird, looks very similar to the mockingbirds found on the other nearby islands. It is, however, slightly different. And that is what makes it so important. Charles Darwin saw these small differences as he toured the Galapagos on the H.M.S. Beagle, and he also realised that these birds were isolated from each other and developing in different ways. It was this bird that sparked the creation of the Theory of Natural Selection, which has changed the way we view the biological world forever and has permeated every aspect of science and culture that we know today.
But unfortunately soon after Darwin left, this bird disappeared from its home island. It is now restricted to fewer that 100 individuals found on two tiny islets. Together with partners in the Galapagos, Durrell will restore this bird through habitat restoration and captive breeding to its former glory.
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It’s the smallest pig in the world and its piglets fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. But what the pygmy hog lacks in stature it makes up for in function. We believe that this pig, which lives in the rich grasslands at the northern edge of India’s border with Bhutan, is an important indicator of the health of its ecosystem; better so than the more charismatic animals such as rhinos and buffalo which are also found there.
The pygmy hog once roamed throughout the grassland habitats that form a narrow belt between India and the Himalayas, but over the years their numbers have dramatically declined until they were feared extinct. The species was described in 1847, and virtually unknown until its rediscovery in 1971. Durrell started a captive breeding programme in 1996.
Since that time we have worked to protect their habitat, understand the factors responsible for their decline and work with the local communities that converted much of the rich grassland into agriculture. It has taken time and in 2007 we made the first full reintroduction for 16 animals to a newly protected area. We will now continue to stage releases in the coming years as we work to restore this species.
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Frogs are charismatic and well loved animals but they are also undergoing major declines around the world. Until a major global assessment was carried out in 2004, these declines were passing relatively unseen. As many as 160 species may have slipped into extinction without and another 120 have not been seen in recent years.
What is so startling is both the speed of their demise and the fact that we are in the in dark about the way in which they are going. As with other species, frogs are getting hit by habitat loss and over-exploitation. But they are also getting dramatically affected by the spread of a fungal disease that when introduced into an area has devastating results. At the moment there is no known cure. Add to this the effects of climate change which is interacting with each of these threats and exacerbating them and you have truly scary situation. Durrell is focussing on the amphibians of Latin America where the threats are most acute.
Building on our international reputation for amphibian husbandry and conservation, we are launching an initiative in 11 countries to monitor and study amphibians, train local NGOs and communicate knowledge so that we can understand and halt declines as soon as possible.
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The St Lucia amazon parrot is a beautiful green bird with a bright blue head found in the rainforests of St Lucia. It is the national bird and is proudly displayed in the crest of the island. But this bird declined to worryingly low numbers in the 1960s and 1970s. Desired by private breeders for its beautiful plumage and rarity, birds were taken illegally from the country.
For a long-time Durrell has supported the conservation efforts of the St Lucian government to protect this species and raise awareness about its importance to the island. Now it seems that after all this effort we have one of the few conservation success stories on our hands. Populations have steadily grown and the bird seems to be in a good state of health. But how can we be sure? Normally you monitor the population over time to show whether it’s growing or declining. But when you have a green parrot flit between tops of green trees in a vast mountainous rainforest, things become more complicated.
The terrain, heat and humidity make the area extremely hazardous to work in. Despite this, we are in the process of mounting a major expedition to assess the success of the work we have done with this bird. Bringing together volunteers from the UK and St Lucia we will send out teams into the forest to make the first ever detailed survey of the population.
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In the Comoro islands life is very hard. This small set of islands between Mozambique and Madagascar is one of the poorest places on the planet. Coupled with this, the islands extremely rich forest habitats are rapidly getting cleared for agriculture.
This has been so drastic that nearly all rivers have stopped flowing as they became clogged with surface soil from surrounding hills. Most people on the islands are left with the stark choice of whether to cut down the forests to make way for crops that may be able to feed their family. For a long time Durrell has helped a local organisation study the endangered Livingstone’s fruitbat – one of the largest bats in the world.
This bat is an important seed disperser in the forest and because it requires large areas of forest and old roosting trees – is a natural flagship for the threatened forests. Now in the Comoros there is new impetus to create protected areas for the forest (there are currently none) that will be run by communities to provide them with alternative incomes. We will support this process by leading biodiversity assessments and training for local organisations to monitor their biodiversity and use of natural resources.
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Mauritius is an iconic island for conservationists. It was home to the dodo, the symbol for species that are rapidly doomed after their first interaction with humans. In fact, more than 10 species of birds and reptiles have also disappeared alongside the dodo on Mauritius since human settlement in the 1600’s.
Many species still continue to be threatened to the present day, and whole communities of species are affected by exploitation, habitat loss and invasive species. Restoring Mauritius’ wild areas has become a major challenge. Durrell first became involved in Mauritius in the 1970’s through Gerald Durrell’s trips to the island. Since then, it has been one of the main focal areas of our conservation work. Many species have been saved from extinction as a result of our intervention, from the famous pink pigeon and Mauritius kestrel to the Rodrigues fruitbat and olive white-eye bird.
In more recent times, Durrell has concentrated on rebuilding the ecosystems of the small islands off Mauritius that once teemed with animal life. We take each species at a time, study its former range, understand the effects of putting it back and then start a process of reintroductions and monitoring. At the moment we are focussing on native reptiles, such as the Telfair’s skink and Durrell’s night gecko (named after our founder).
But these are fragile ecosystems, a single rat getting back onto one of these islands can wipe out an entire population of reptiles. Currently, we have re-established healthy populations of three species of reptile on four of the small islands. This work will continue until we have a healthy food-chain to support the on-going survival of the habitats and wildlife that live on these precious islands.
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