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Rare pink pigeon born Jersey wildlife park

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Rare pink pigeon born Jersey wildlife park

Rare baby bird

The newborn pink pigeon has been named Laurie

The Mauritius Pink Pigeon is one of the rarest birds in the world. Conservationist say ‘It’s hell bent on its own extinction’. However one of these rare pink pigeons has been born at the Jersey wildlife park.

Mauritius is the home to some of the world’s rarest plant and wildlife.

To give you an idea – there is an expression ‘as dead as a dodo’ the dodo is a bird which used to live exclusively on Mauritius but it was eaten to extinction by humanity some 300 years ago. It has become the symbol of extinction.

Ironically the dodo was a giant flightless pigeon which stood about one metre tall.

The pink pigeon was destined to go the same way, until the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust, or the Durrell Wildife Conservation Trust as it is known today, stepped in. That was back in the late 1970’s

Like the dodo it looked like the pink pigeon too was being eaten to extinction. Not by people however, by feral cats, mongooses and monkeys. The cats were eating the birds and the monkeys and mongooses the eggs.

The future looked very bleak and still does.

But now the 70th pink pigeon in captivity has been born at a Jersey wildlife park, conservationists have said.
Laurie’s egg was found abandoned several days before it hatched at Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust.

Numbers of the endangered species native to Mauritius have risen from about 12 to 470 over the last thirty years, due to intensive management of the wild population.

The bird keeping staff said they were “delighted” with the birth.

Bird

Gerald Durrell captured pink pigeons for the first captive breeding programme in 1976

And although the Jersey Wildlife Trust has done much to help save the Pink Pigeon.

Here’s the background story to the pink pigeon and another endangered bird the Mauritius kestrel.



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