It wasn't just that I was getting a chance to see something incredibly rare and beautiful, a pair of birds with an amazing conservation story. It was also that I was instantly utterly besotted with them.
In 1948, a doctor in Invercargill, New Zealand, discovered the remnants of a species of bird thought to be extinct: the takahē. The only reason the birds had survived as long as they had was because they were living in a remote, virtually inaccessible valley -- one conservationist and writer Gerald Durrell visited over a decade later.
Durrell wrote about the thrilling conservation story of the takahē, which included carrying eggs by hand to a conservation center, using volunteer hens to keep them warm and safe, so takahē chicks could be raised in captivity and reintroduced safely to the wild. His compelling story not just of the birds themselves, but of the time he spent in their magical valley, captivated me as a young reader when I was devouring his entire literary output in the 1990s.
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