12:00pm Thursday 3rd December 2009
By Claire Marshall
A TEAM of conservation experts travelled over 5,000 miles, endured a terrifying storm during a flight, lived off rice and worked in 40 degree heat to save a rare duck from extinction.
Nigel Jarrett, of Cam, a conservation expert from Slimbridge Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, has talked exclusively to the Gazette about an amazing journey he and two other Slimbridge staff made to save a rare duck in Madagascar.
The team, which also included Mark Roberts, of Cam, and Martin Brown, of Slimbridge, were invited to join the project run by the Peregrine Fund with the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust.
It was a joint effort to try and double the population of the critically endangered Madagascar Pochard and was an emergency visit originally organised for next July, but moved forward because it emerged that there were only six females left.
From the off-set the trip was faced with challenges and disruption.
With just seven days to reach a nest of eggs that were about to hatch the men flew into Kenya and were delayed for a day at the airport. The next day they caught a plane to Madagascar but mid flight hit a horrific electric storm.
"I did think this is the end for us," said Nigel, a father-of-three.
"The plane was shaking and at one point it seemed like it was just dropping out of the sky, then suddenly it must have hit an air pocket and regained altitude.
"People were screaming and crying, it was awful."
The plane returned to Kenya and the team had to take a second plane to the African island the next day, leaving them just five days to get to the eggs.
With yet more bad luck their baggage was seized by Customs, which contained all the bird equipment, and so the clever trio bought a plastic box and some tubes on their journey from the airport to their hotel where they rigged up a make-shift incubator system ready for the ducklings.
"From there we needed to drive to our base camp, but there was more bad luck because the bridge across to the lake was down and we had to wait two days for it to be fixed," said Nigel.
"All the while we were thinking, we are going to be too late."
Finally they made it to base camp at a lake in the middle of a volcano, twice the height of Snowdon, where village elders had been watching out for the Pochard on behalf of the team.
While they waited for the elders to arrive they sat and watched a large bird of prey swoop in and catch what looked like a Pochard. Weary by this time the team started to give up hope, believing the eggs had already hatched and been eaten before they could save them.
But in a sudden change of luck they were led to the nest where they found nine Pochard eggs on the brink of hatching.
"We were just sky high seeing the eggs, after all the bad luck we were there just in time," said Nigel, who returned to the UK last week.
After successfully hatching the eggs they found a second clutch of eight eggs and a further seven in another nest. The team managed to successfully hatch 24 of the 24 ducks giving the population a strong chance of increasing.
"It was an amazing trip," said Nigel. "It was a real achievement for the team, we did what we went there to do."
The aim now is to raise funds to set up a breeding programme for the Pochard in Madagascar.
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