A DUCK that has been called the “world’s rarest” and was declared extinct had a rising-from-the-ashes moment when conservationists found a flock of 25 on a remote Madagascar lake in 2006.
Now, scientists have found eggs that spell out good signs for the future of the species.
Durrell’s field programmes director Chris Ransom said this was the start of an extensive project to bring the bird back. The tribulations of the Madagascar pochard led the conservationists to become the managers of a major infrastructure project that would maintain water supply for 10,000 people.
The Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust’s story with the Madagascar pochard started in the 1980s – but the bird, known in Malagasy as the fotsy maso, had been widespread in northern Madagascar’s volcanic lakes until the forests it lived in were destroyed for agriculture.
Former Durrell curator of birds Glyn Young – at the time a young zookeeper with a duck obsession – surveyed Lake Alaotra, where the last known flock of pochards lived – “spending days in canoes going through the marshes, searching for them, but to no avail”, Mr Ransom explained.
In Madagascar, bad roads mean the remote lakes they were working on are “a huge effort” to get to, Mr Ransom explained.
The ducks were declared extinct in 2004.
However, just two years later, conservationists from the Peregrine Fund found a flock of 25 birds on Lake Matsaborimena – and immediately sent pictures to Dr Young. The team, he confirmed, had found a flock of the pochards.
Numbers of the pochard had been so low for so long that conservationists didn’t know whether 25 was a normal flock size.
Carrying eggs for miles
Sadly, the team found the population wasn’t breeding – and with just the one flock in the wild, creating a “safety net” of captive birds was crucial to keeping the pochard alive.
In 2009, 24 eggs were collected to breed in captivity – and the first captive-born birds were born in 2011 in a small Madagascar town.
“Almost overnight, we basically increased the population of the species by 35%,” Mr Ransom said.
When teams go to transport eggs, they have to walk dozens of kilometres carrying the eggs to get them to their incubators – a 44-kilometre journey they had to undertake again recently to collect eggs.
Lake Sofia
With the “safety net” population establishing itself in captivity, the team also looked for a second location, in addition to Lake Matsaborimena, for a wild population to live.
Surveying 26 different sites, they “found the same story everywhere,” Mr Ransom said.
“That was that history of wetland degradation. They found that everywhere, the wetlands were being heavily degraded and massively over-exploited by people. So it was really, really challenging to find anywhere that would be suitable for restoring a population of ducks.”
The solution was Lake Sofia – a “beautiful, beautiful lake” where other species were doing well, Mr Ransom continued.
Around 10,000 people relied on it, and conservationists spent years preparing the lake and building ties with the local population. They set up village savings and micro-loans associations, and encouraged farmers to use more intensive farming that wouldn’t use pesticides.
It took five years to prepare the lake and the region ahead of the first release of birds in 2018. They have now released over 130 birds and estimate the flock is around 70-strong – but pochards are hard to track because attaching tags to their legs would make them unable to dive for fish.
But in 2023, disaster struck.
The deluge
The stream out of Lake Sofia burst its banks – the result of high levels of rainfall on heavily-exploited land upstream.
The river went from one metre to around 30 metres wide overnight – and a few months later was more than 120 metres wide.
Lake Sofia was reduced to “a puddle” – and that was before dry season had the chance to hit.
At its deepest, it was 40 cm deep, and feeding stations were installed for the 40 pochards left and the other birds living there.
For the communities there, the flood was “almost a humanitarian catastrophe” as wells dried up.
“We’re conservationists, we learn about how to survey species, even work with communities. But the idea of a lake that’s just vanishing almost overnight is not something that you learn about or get trained to do,” Mr Ransom said.
The only solution, they realised, was a dam – first a 100-metre temporary dam built by locals using sandbags and wood.
An emergency appeal helped Durrell and the Wild Wetlands Trust bring diggers, sand and cement to the lake. And, 100 days later, a 140-metre-wide dam was in place and the lake could start rebuilding itself.
The next generation of pochards
Since the dam was finished in February 2025, the lake has gone back to around 90% of its original coverage.
Mr Ransom said: “Who would have thought, at the start of this, that we’d have been able to do that?”
And recently, the team found nests and eggs – which could be a sign that Madagascar pochards are on their way to making a comeback.
The lake is “fairly well recovered”, Mr Ransom said. “The people all have water. We’ve restored that ecosystem, we’ve saved that lake. Everything is looking really positive.
“The signs of breeding on the lake are a clear sign that we’ve managed to restore the system.”
A full podcast with Mr Ransom is available on the JEP’s sister publication Bailiwick Podcasts.
