Madagascar Pochard - Back From The Dead, But For How Long?

So the animal I want to talk about for this post is extremely rare and not very well known, leave a comment below if you’ve ever heard and how that was. I had never heard of it, till a few months ago through a piece of work I had to do. Yesterday I was lucky enough

to learn about some of the work which is going on at the minute to save the world’s rarest bird from extinction.

The species I’m going to be talking about is the Madagascar Pochard is a bird which is endemic to Madagascar and until 2006 was believed to have become extinct around 1992. However 22 individuals were discovered in a single lake in the north of the country, since then the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust in Slimbridge have undertaken the responsibility to help save this species whose future is in a very precarious position. They have had several successful breeding seasons over the past few years and the species is now made up of around 80 individuals in both the captive and wild populations.

Starting with a bit of background on the Pochard, it is believed that the species began to experience dramatic declines around the 1940s-1950s; these declines were initiated due to the introduction of invasive fish preying on chicks as well as hunting, gill nets and the destructive effect of grazing animals coming down to the water’s edge and so destroying their nests. They are a medium sized duck 45-56cm with the males possessing rich brown mahogany feathers with white underparts. As a diving duck it primarily feeds invertebrates with slight supplementation from plant matter. As for breeding behaviour, nesting has been observed from July to February with nest sites usually being sited within close proximity

of waterbodies in vegetation.

A vast amount of effort is currently being put into the Madagascar Pochard, the aim is to first bring their numbers up to a viable population so as steps can be undertaken to reintroduce animals to new locations to allow the species to become more structurally secure.  As well as this an attempt is being made to place legal protection on areas which have had little disruption from human activities such as Lake Alaotra. The final step being taken is a continued extensive search in the hope of discovering more isolated pockets of the species. It is important that if any other population which currently remain in the wild are found as currently one of the major problems the Pochard has is the genetic bottleneck which it has been forced through so any individual found will help increase the size of the source gene pool.

A genetic bottleneck occurs when a species experience reductions in their population size and in turn this reduces the size of the potential gene pool for the species and so can increase the representation of certain recessive genes which have a negative influence on the species fitness and survival rates. Genetic

bottleneck have been seen in multiple species, such as the Mauritius kestrel whose numbers fell as low as a single breeding pair in 1974 to 200 breeding pairs in 1990. So a bottleneck does not mark the end of a species by a long way, it does however require extensive stud books to be kept in captive population in an attempt to limit the genetic loss from the species gene pool.

So if you want to help this cause along with their other projects the Wildlife & Wetland Trust and Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust are working on such as the Madagascar Pochard and the Spoon-Billed Sandpiper you can of course donate online. But if you want a good day out as well, head to one of their reserves to lend your support and see some amazing wild fowl. Currently a lot of the breeding seasons are about to start and so there is lot to be seen and enjoyed.

Thanks for reading!                                                            

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