Zoos are saving endangered species

MANY people think that zoos exist just to show off exotic animals and, indeed, educating the public is an important part of a modern zoo’s work.

However, the focus is shifting more and more towards research and conservation; zoos are becoming intensive care wards for species in danger of extinction. If an animal’s numbers in the wild become critically low, zoos may be its last hope.

The California condor and Przewalski’s horse were saved from extinction and restored to the wild thanks to zoo breeding programmes.

Dublin Zoo has a herd of scimitar-horned oryx, a species thought to be extinct in the wild. This elegant antelope, resembling a large goat with huge crescent-shaped horns, once roamed the arid deserts of North Africa, one of the most extreme habitats on Earth. The animal’s white coat reflected the glare of the merciless desert sun. An oryx can go without water for weeks by not urinating and letting its body temperature soar during the heat of the day. The magnificent horns led to its downfall; they were prized by hunters but climate change, human encroachment and competition with livestock hastened the oryx’s demise.

According to team leader, Helen Clarke, the oryx has bred successfully in Fota Wildlife Park but the genes of the Irish animals became so well-represented in the world population that further breeding was halted. Recently, however, the stud-book keeper has suggested that breeding should resume in Dublin. There are five females there and a male which was born in Fota. Unfortunately, he is a gelding, so a sire will have to be brought in.

There are now about 1,400 scimitar-horned oryxes in zoos worldwide. In 1985, animals from Britain were released into a large protected area in Tunisia. Attitudes to conservation are changing in North Africa and the tourist potential is increasingly recognised. Hopes are high that the scimitar-horned oryx will once again roam its desert homeland.

Another North African species features prominently in Dublin’s conservation programme. The Waldrapp ibis is now ‘critically endangered’ in the wild. This relative of the stork has a bare vulture-like red head. Dark funereal plumes, iridescent with purple and green, sprout from its neck and the back of the head. It’s not as elegant a creature as the oryx but its cultural profile makes up for what it lacks in the beauty department. The long bill curves downwards like a curlew’s.

The famous sacred ibis of Egypt is a different species but some ancient hieroglyphs clearly show the Waldrapp.

Ibises are good to eat and excessive hunting was the cause of their demise. There are about 65 breeding pairs, and a hundred or so non-breeders, left in the wild. The surviving colonies are in the mountains of Morocco, apart from a small one discovered recently in Syria. Up to the 17th Century, Waldrapps bred in Europe.

Zoos began breeding Waldrapps in the 1960s. The Dublin colony dates from 2002, when a cliff-face was constructed for ibis nests. According to team leader, Eddie O’Brien, it has 16 birds, six of which were born in Dublin. Breeding was disrupted last year, because the ibises had to be inoculated against avian flu in the middle of the nesting season. There are five nests this year.

A semi-wild Waldrapp colony has been established at Grünau in Austria. Although the birds are fed, they are allowed to roam freely in the countryside and forage for themselves. Ibises once lived in Austria, but the country is too cold for them in winter. The zoo-bred birds had no idea where to go on migration so some of them were trained to follow micro-light aircraft south into Italy. The experiment appears to have been a success but, although the birds moved northwards in the spring, they did not return to Grünau. The Austrian ibises have other, more pressing, problems, however. Zoo-bred birds are far less streetwise than wild ones and many fall victim to predators. They also lack the foraging skills which wild birds learn from their peers and this is where research at Dublin Zoo comes in.

Barry Brogan of Trinity College, an expert on Waldrapps, has embarked on an ambitious programme to teach life-skills to the ibises. Studying the Austrian colonies, he has devised a training scheme which he proposes to introduce to Dublin. By burying food items, Barry hopes to get the ibises to forage for themselves just as they would in the wild. Teaching them to avoid predators will be more difficult and, to solve this problem, Barry has enlisted the help of colonies of blue tits and budgies at the zoo. By playing alarm calls when models of birds of prey and other predators move into their line of vision, Barry can educate young tits and budgies about the dangers such creatures pose. The models developed for tits and budgies, Barry hopes, can be adapted to suit the ibises. His research should help to increase the survival rates of birds released to the wild.