Home from fulfilling one of my lifelong dreams (since reading Gerald Durrell's Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons anyway). Dave and I spent five weeks volunteering for the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, based at Ferney field station; the site of an ambitious reintroduction project involving Echo Parakeets, Pink Pigeons, Mauritian Cuckoo-shrikes and Mauritian Paradise Flycatchers. Our main job was to catch and translocate 14 flycatchers to Ferney from National Park and to monitor their movements post release, using radio telemetry. For a tiny non-migratory bird, they can fly. One male gapped it 25 kilometres back to where he was caught, within days. Thankfully the rest seem to have settled down.
Echo parakeets tasting freedom.
Our colleague Veronique Couttee extracting a female Mauritian Paradise Flycatcher from a mistnet.
