CONTRIBUTION
The northern bald or hermit ibis, a black-plumed bird with a long curved beak and the characteristic head that gives it its name, went from being present in North Africa, the Middle East, Southern Europe – including Spain – and Central Europe to being extinct in every single territory with the exception of Morocco, where some 700 sedentary individuals remain in the wild. The alarm was raised internationally back in the 1990s, leading the Centro de Conservación de la Biodiversidad Zoobotánico Jerez (ZBJ) Alberto Durán, a public agency under Jerez City Council, to launch the Eremita Project, aimed at creating a breeding colony that could be a springboard for the species’ reintroduction in Spain.
“The hermit ibis is a bird that lives in groups, spends a lot of time on the ground and feeds mainly on insects that it extracts with its long beak. For this reason, its ideal habitat is grasslands,” explains Miguel Ángel Quevedo, the project’s coordinator. “In the past 50 years, its world population has slumped by 90% as a consequence of persecution, pesticides and land-use changes, which have gradually turned pastures into crop fields.”
As the species nests in coastal and inland cliff sites, the International Advisory Group for the Northern Bald Ibis – a team of experts set up by the United Nations Environment Programme – proposed the south of Spain as a suitable test ground. The ZBJ’s Eremita Project had its official launch in 2003, focused on reintroducing the species in the Jandas area of Cadiz province. Under a partnership agreement with the Spanish Ministry of Defence, an aviary was installed at one end of the Retín military zone, near Zahara de los Atunes, and the Junta de Andalucía co-financed the study of release methods, with scientific input from the Estación Biológica de Doñana (CSIC).
“The individuals involved with the captive breeding wore black t-shirts and helmets in the form of the northern bald ibis. This meant the chicks would imprint on them when dressed this way but would not recognize them in other clothes,” Quevedo explains. “That was important because, once in the wild, we didn’t want the birds approaching any humans they came across, but we did want them to follow their disguised carers and expand through the area once the cage was opened.” Starting in 2004, the ZBJ raised, released and monitored around 30 chicks a year, an effort that four years later would produce a major and consequential milestone: the first reintroduction in the wild of birds born in captivity.
This marked the start of the project’s next phase with the aid of the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA), which had set up its own captive breeding program in the 1990s. The result was what Quevedo refers to as “the paradox of having between 1,000 and 1,500 northern bald ibises in zoos across the continent, while the bird was going extinct in the wild.” A request went out and over 30 zoos in Germany, Austria, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic and Switzerland began sending juveniles to the Eremita Project. “This allowed us to introduce 60 chicks each year, after successfully integrating ZBJ and European specimens,” says Mariano Cuadrado, a conservation biologist and another of the project’s leaders. “Since 2014 we have seen between 35 and 55 chicks annually born in the wild, so we already have a population that is stable, and possibly – we are evaluating it – self-sustaining, with more individuals born than dying. We have stopped introducing captive-bred chicks in order to confirm this,” he explains. The number of breeding pairs and chicks born in the wild is growing every year, with 32 nests spread over 3 colonies recorded in 2024, resulting in 64 hatchings.
“We’re not interested in exhibiting animals, our aim is to conserve them,” says Quevedo, to which Mariano Cuadrado adds: “The reintroduction of the ibis is the culmination of years of work with endangered Iberian species: the Iberian lynx, spoonbill, Egyptian vulture, bearded vulture, marbled duck and lesser kestrel, among others.” As Maher Mahjoub, head of the Center for Mediterranean Cooperation of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, states in his nomination letter, all these successes have made the ZBJ “an international reference in breeding projects for endangered species.”
Photo credit: Zoobotánico de Jerez