Andalusian Buttonquail: Eighteen Birds Leave Morocco for a Species Extinct in Spain

ighteen Andalusian buttonquails landed at the port of Algeciras on September 9 and were taken to the biodiversity conservation center of the Zoobotanico de Jerez. They were born in Morocco, from eggs located in the nest and then incubated to hatching, and the regional government of Andalusia, which announced it, reads the arrival as a new stage toward a reintroduction in Spain, where the bird has vanished. Eight days later, on September 17, Morocco’s National Agency for Water and Forests set out its own ex situ conservation program for the subspecies. For Turnix sylvaticus sylvaticus, one of the most threatened taxa in the world, survives with certainty in a single place on the planet: the Moroccan Atlantic coast, in the Oualidia region, where probably a few hundred birds remain, bound to traditional crops and market gardens.

Two breeding nuclei will therefore live in parallel, one at the Ain Sebaa zoological park in Casablanca, the other at Jerez, managed together, with the studbook of the captive population centralized in Andalusia; at least four field campaigns are planned in Morocco over the coming years, each bird identified and given a record of provenance to keep inbreeding at bay. The method is not experimental: it is the one that brought back the Iberian lynx. The financing comes from compensatory measures attached to renewable-energy projects in Cadiz and Seville. The director general of the Moroccan agency reads the program as “an additional guarantee for its future.” The reversal is worth measuring: the bird that carries the name of Andalusia had left it, driven out by coastal urbanization and the intensification of farming in the 19th and 20th centuries. It will return there, if it returns at all, out of a Moroccan field.

Photo: Mounir Neddi, CC BY-SA 4.0.