COVER STORY:Biodiversity is life. Biodiversity is our life.

Caption: A crested ibis in flight in Sado, Niigata Prefecture
Credit: AFLO

Return of the Crested Ibis

In September 2008, in the island of Sado in Niigata Prefecture, with upwards of 1,600 people looking on, ten crested ibises were released from wooden boxes to fly into the skies. People clapped and cheered as the birds took wing. No crested ibis had flown over Japan for twenty-seven years, when in 1981 the last of the birds were captured for protection.

At one time, the crested ibis was found nearly all over Japan, feeding off frogs, fish and other small animals in the paddy fields, and living in close proximity with the Japanese people.

However, the ibis population dropped sharply due to over-hunting of the bird for its feathers, logging in the forests that formed the bird’s habitat, and a decrease in the bird’s food supply owing to the rising use of agricultural chemicals. By the 1960s, only ten ibises remained.

With the bird on the edge of extinction, the government started a captive breeding program in 1965. In 1999, Japan also received a gift of two crested ibises from China, and the same year, for the first time in Japan, a chick was born through the captive breeding program.

Concurrently with the breeding program, the birds are also trained to return to the wild. At a reintroduction station within the grounds of the Sado Japanese Crested Ibis Conservation Center, acclimatization cages with ponds and trees arranged to resemble the natural environment have been built, and this is where the birds are trained to catch food, fly and evade predators. In addition, there are initiatives underway on Sado to overhaul the paddy fields and waterways that form the habitat for the small animals that are prey for the ibis, and to restore the forests where the ibis roosts in order to prepare an environment in the wild where the birds can survive.

Kohei Sasabuchi of the Sado Ranger Office at the Ministry of the Environment says, “The crested ibis is the Umbrella Species, so to speak, at the top of the biological pyramid in the area. Returning the ibis to the wild denotes conservation of the biodiversity in the area.”

In September 2009, another twenty birds were released. The ibises that have been released are fitted with small transmitters, and the Center has been following their lives in the wild. With the cooperation of local people, the Center also collects information about sightings of the birds on a daily basis.

As of April 1, 114 ibises raised in Japan are waiting for the moment when they will be released into the wild.