Northern Bald Ibis - Conservation Status

Conservation Status

Although the Northern Bald Ibis was long extinct in Europe, many colonies in Morocco and Algeria survived until the early twentieth century, when they began to decline more rapidly, the last colony in Algeria disappearing in the late 1980s. In Morocco there were about 38 colonies in 1940 and 15 in 1975, but the last migratory populations in the Atlas Mountains had vanished by 1989. The species is now officially critically endangered according to the IUCN scale, with an estimated population in 2008 of around 500 in the wild and over 1,000 in captivity. The Northern Bald Ibis is one of the key species to which the draft Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA) applies, and it has a detailed, internationally agreed conservation action plan under the agreement. As a species that is threatened with extinction, it is listed on Appendix 1 of CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), which means that trade in wild-caught birds is illegal, and may be licensed only in exceptional circumstances.

The Northern Bald Ibis has declined for several centuries, at least partly as a consequence of unidentified natural causes. The more rapid decline in the past hundred years, with a loss of 98% of the population between 1900 and 2002, is the result of a combination of factors. These include significant human persecution, especially hunting, and also the loss of steppe and non-intensive agricultural areas (particularly in Morocco), pesticide poisoning, disturbance, and dam construction. The discovery in Jordan of three dead adults from the Turkish colony confirmed that the overuse of pesticides is still a cause of death on migration. These birds were tracked by satellite after leaving Birecik; they stopped off briefly at the Syrian colony, and were later found dead in the Jordanian desert. Although the corpses were close to electricity pylons, the cause of death was poison, probably laid by chicken farmers to kill rodents.