THE DISCOVERY IN 2002

N. Bald Ibis (NBI), one of the rarest bird globally, since 1994 listed as “Critically Endangered” by the IUCN’s Red List (BirdLife 2004), until 2002 was known as surviving in the wild only in a few scattered colonies in Morocco - for a total of 92 breeding pairs (Bowden et al. 2003). That same year, on 19 April, a relict colony of 7 individuals of this bird species, belonging to an oriental sub-population separated from the Moroccan one centuries ago, was discovered in Syria (Serra 2003) - from where it was believed it had become extinct more than 70 years before (Aharoni 1928-29, Safriel 1980).

The news attracted the attention of the conservation community and of international media: NBI suddenly “reappeared” in the Middle East (in Eurasia actually) where it had been declared extinct in 1989 (last NBI colony known is the one from Birecik, Turkey). Post-1989 occasional NBI sightings in western and south-western Arabia had led some to believe that an NBI “lost colony” was possibly still breeding somewhere in Arabia or Eastern Africa: this mysterious breeding colony had been even emphatically defined as the “Tutankhamun’s tomb” of Arabian ornithology (Martins 1993).

The successful decoding of the traditional naturalistic knowledge of the Bedouin nomads, crucial to discover the NBI relict colony of Palmyra (Serra et al. 2003), triggered an interesting international debate about the need to include this type of knowledge (called by academic people “anecdotal information”) in the scientific naturalistic surveying and research (Blair 2005). In particular, it was the “confession” by a Palmyra hunter about the killing of an ibis in the late 1990s which draw the attention of Serra on the chance that the ornithological literature might have been wrong in listing the NBI as extinct from Syria since long time ago.

The unmistakable sketch of an ibis (at the top left of page), drawn by a young nomad shepherd in March 2002 (named Rabie, the person portrayed at the top right of page), was the first compelling evidence that some few ibises where still surviving undetected somewhere in the wider Palmyra steppe. After this key clue, Serra triggered a systematic and relentless search across the Palmyra desert (> 100 Bedouin familes interviewed in a standardized way, Serra et al. 2004) - yielding the relict colony about one month later.