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Crested Ibis — printable fact sheet
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Crested Ibis
Nipponia nippon
Nipponia nippon is a white ibis with a shaggy crest, a bare red face and salmon-pink flush in the wings, and it came about as close to extinction as a species can and still return. Once widespread across East Asia, it was hunted and lost its wet rice-paddy foraging habitat to pe…
Did you know?
- By the 1980s, only seven wild Crested Ibises remained in the world, all found in a remote Chinese village, making their recovery one of the most remarkable bird conservation stories.
- The species name Nipponia nippon means, essentially, "Japan of Japan," which makes the bird's extinction in wild Japan an awkward piece of history and is part of why its reintroduction there carried such national weight. Its recovery depended on persuading farmers around Yangxian to stop using pesticides on their rice paddies, which is now a formal certification scheme selling "ibis rice" at a premium. Because the entire living population descends from about seven individuals, inbreeding is a permanent management problem and studbooks are used to plan pairings. Adults probe soft paddy mud with the long down-curved bill for loaches, frogs and insects, feeling rather than seeing their prey.
What I learned
Draw the crested ibis
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