Scientists and conservationists are mourning
Goja, a northern white ibis killed this month by illegal hunters in Italy.
Not many of the innumerable birds shot by
hunters have names. But Goja had been raised in captivity, in a project to
rebuild the population of this critically endangered species.
It is the misfortune of this bird to be both
migratory and large. Its 120-centimetre wingspan makes it an easy target, so it
has all but vanished from the Middle East, Europe and North Africa. About 500
birds in Morocco are virtually the only known wild breeding population.
Goja's sad fate shows the difficulty of
reintroducing a species. Biologists have been hand-raising these birds, and
teaching them to migrate from breeding areas in Germany to winter homes in
Italy, by leading them with ultralight planes. Goja, having done that once,
made the journey unaided last year. She was making another trip when she was
shot. Almost half of last year's 37 migrating birds were also lost to hunters.
Scientists are enthusiastic about the
follow-the-light-plane method of reintroducing species to their ancestral
homes. But the image of Goja being blasted out of the sky by a trigger-happy
hunter with a shotgun but no licence is a cheerless metaphor for our own
species's failure to coexist.
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