Mauritius Fodies get downlisted: a cause for celebration

BirdLife International has released its latest assessment of the state of the world’s birds which it contributes to the overall Red List of Threatened Species. Birds are by far the best studied group in the world and provide a fairly good, although not complete, surrogate for the state of biodiversity in general.

The results this year seem to follow the trend established in most species-based assessments, as knowledge increases more species are listed as threatened. It seems that even with increasing conservation efforts around the world, the number of threatened animals seems to constantly increase. This assessment of all bird species found that 12% or 1,227 species were classified as threatened. A total of 77 species changed their conservation status with 9 being uplisted to Critically Endangered and 7 being downlisted from Critically Endangered to lower categories.

It is these 7 that provide some of the conservation success stories – one of which is the Mauritius fody (Foudia rubra) that is very close to our hearts. Mauritius Wildlife Foundation (MWF) has been working with this species for a number of years now. They have established a captive breeding programme for the species and initiated a number of releases onto Ile aux Aigrettes; the island that they have restored and manage as a native biodiversity sanctuary. The next stage of the plan is to reintroduce them to Round Island, once the introduced sparrows have all been removed. Again this is another species that has been brought back from the brink in Mauritius and can join the likes of the echo parakeet (2008’s Red list downlisting) and Mauritius kestrel in the small, but increasing group of conservation success stories.

I suppose the question we have to ask is what does it take to turn these species around? Birdlife for example is focussing on all the Critically Endangered species. Durrell is working on a few of this including the Mangrove finch in Galapagos and the Madagascar pochard. Incidentally the Mangrove finch is joined by the medium tree-finch (Camarhynchus pauper), in becoming a victim of the parasitic fly Philornis downsi, which is an ectoparasite that is found in finch nests. This finch is endemic to the island of Floreana, which will be the target of a major restoration project.

In the cases where species have seen their fortunes change, and not because we have found unknown populations, dedication was the key to their success. Long term commitment through dedicated programmes of study and restoration do pay dividends in the end. But they leave important questions for the conservation community. As trends move towards ecosystem level conservation, will we be able to ensure sufficient focus on the species that need it most? Additionally at a time where financial resources continue to be squeezed can we justify the huge investment needed to turn a species around, when it could be going towards broad landscape level measures? One thing to always remember is that in most cases the conservation of the species in the tip of the iceberg that hides an ever broadening range of actions underneath. Changing the fate of the fody has required advances in captive husbandry of small passerines, numerous PhD and MSc studies, has involved training lots of people from around the world and generated numerous new skills that can be applied all over the place. The species is downlisted, and we can all celebrate, but we should also recognise the broader achievement that this signifies.