Today's installment is about one of the most remarkable of all living things, the short-tailed albatross, and it's journey from extinction (or so we thought) to hope. An excerpt from my book 100 Under 100: The Race to Save the World's Rarest Living Things.

Short-tailed Albatross Phoebastria albatrus

Ten million short-tailed albatross once glided above the waves across thirty-five million square kilometres of North Pacific Ocean, from Japan to North America, from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Hawaiian Islands. These large, 8.5 kilogram white birds, with a generous bubble-gum pink bill, and a wingspan reaching over two metres, were once the most abundant albatross and the largest seabird in all the northern hemisphere.
The defining characteristic of the true seabirds like the short-tailed albatross is their nomadic, oceanic life. They are as much marine creatures as are whales and fish. Species such as albatrosses and shearwaters, which spend most of their lives foraging on the high seas, can travel great distances with minimal effort by taking advantage of the winds. Next to food supply, wind probably effects their movement and distribution more than anything else, especially between 35 and 60 degrees latitude where it blows almost continuously. On long, slender wings short-tailed albatrosses soar just above the water, beating them only occasionally to maintain lift, taking advantage of updrafts created as air currents deflect off the faces of waves. This uses much less energy than flapping flight and enables them to travel the vast distances they need to gather food. An individual bird might routinely cover hundreds of thousands of square kilometres during the non-breeding season in its search for surface schooling fish and squid. 
Even though they spend much of their lives far from the sight of land, every October, at the beginning of the nesting season, breeding aged short-tailed albatrosses, drawn from all over the North Pacific, leave their solitary life of wandering behind to satisfy the urge to reproduce on Izu-Torishima Island, a tiny 500 hectare speck in the Philippine Sea south of Tokyo, Japan. They had been doing for this thousands of years on Torishima; millions of them once created a bustling city of brilliant white birds where each pair claimed its tiny patch of ground on which to build a nest, lay and incubate an egg, then rear its solitary chick.  Breeding adults returned every year. New offspring, however, would take to the high seas for up to ten years before coming home for the first time to breed themselves once they were sexually mature and paired for life with a mate.
There is going to be trouble whenever a species factors into an economic equation. The short-tailed albatross was no exception to this rule, possessing as it did more than ten-thousand, soft, airy feathers. The bad news was that people in the United States and Europe needed feathers, lots of feathers, to stuff mattresses and pillows. The birds were also collected for their meat, oil, and eggs. There is no such thing as an unexploited chance to make a buck, so the short-tailed albatross, which has no defences on its breeding ground (it had evolved over the millennia in the absence of humans and other predators), was clubbed into near non-existence by Japanese feather collectors. Black rats, stowed-away on their ships, also invaded the island, adding to the decimation of the birds’ population. During the peak of the exploitation, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, five million short-tailed albatross were killed in just over a decade and a half. By the 1930's, when a ban imposed earlier by the Japanese government against killing the birds was finally enforced, the population of the species had plummeted to fewer than fifty. A decade later it was presumed extinct. 
Then a remarkable thing happened. In the early 1950's, a handful of first-time breeding birds that had been away at sea maturing, finally returned home to Torishima to nest. Their reappearance after being at sea for years saved this magnificent species from extinction. By 1954, there were twenty-five birds on Torishima, including at least six mated pairs. 
Given half a chance, the short-tailed albatross has shown that it has remarkable resilience for a species that was all but extinct. Today, there are nearly 3000 of them, the great majority returning to Torishima Island, with the remainder nesting on Minami-kojima Island. Unfortunately, it’s hard to really know what the status of the birds are on this second island, since it lies in a hotly disputed area claimed by Taiwan, China, and Japan since the 1960s and is therefore difficult for scientists to access. 
Despite its brilliant comeback, the North Pacific’s largest seabird is still far from safe.
Much work has been done to enhance the nesting habitat on Torishima, including re-vegetation to prevent erosion, the setting of decoys to attract birds to nest in new areas on the island, and designating it as a national wildlife protection sanctuary of Japan to which only scientists are permitted access. 
What’s more, important strides have been made in the past couple of decades to reduce the accidental drowning of albatrosses on long-line fishing gear, currently the major threat to their survival while at sea. Brightly coloured banners to deter them from landing near the gear and weighted lines that sink the baited hooks out of the reach of albatrosses have reduced the death toll significantly. In fact, two short-tailed albatrosses killed by long-lines in the Bering Sea  in late 2010 were the first recorded by Alaskan Pacific cod fleet since 1998. Of course, this is just one fishery, albeit a large one, however, other North Pacific fleets are also working to reduce the death-toll. 
But there’s one thing nobody has control over. The centre of the short-tailed albatrosses’ universe, Torishima Island, happens to be the exposed top of an active volcano. Eighty-five percent of the species’ entire population nests on the flanks of a actively seething caldera. In 1902, a violent eruption wiped out the entire population of 125 people who lived on the island. Humans never returned to live there. One hundred years later, in August 2002, another eruption occurred, fortunately at a time of year when all the birds were at sea. 
Nobody knows when the next eruption will be, of course, but if it happens during the nesting season it would be catastrophic for the species. As insurance against this, a small group of chicks is being trans-located to a non-volcanic island in Japan’s Bonin Islands where the albatross formerly bred. It’s anticipated that the chicks will “imprint” on the island and return there one day to breed as adults, creating a “backup” population free from the threat of volcanoes. 
In 2010, two pairs of the species were also discovered nesting on the U.S. Wildlife Refuges at Midway Atoll and Kure Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Though it has a long way to go, the short-tailed albatross looks like a species that is determined to once again rule the winds of the North Pacific. 

Today I am beginning a new blog about endangered species and ecosystems. I wanted to take a little different approach with many of the stories, however, focusing on the ones that show it is entirely possible to save species and places, even when most people have written them off. Such stories are powerful proof of anthropologist Margaret Mead's famous dictum "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has". 

Many stories are excerpted from my book: 100 Under 100 The Race to Save the World's Rarest Living Things, which you can see here: http://browseinside.harpercollins.ca/index.aspx?isbn13=9781443404280

Pzrewalski’s Horse Equus ferus

Only two species of wild horse survived into modern times, both living in central Asia. (Zebras, onagers, and asses, though members of the equine family, aren’t considered “horses”, while mustangs and  other “wild” varieties are feral animals descended from escaped domestic horses.). One of them, the historically abundant tarpan, lived on the steppe grasslands of southern Russia. It was hunted to extinction for its meat in the late 19th century. The other is Pzrewalski’s horse (pronounced “shuh-vall-ski’s”).
The only wild ancestor of the domestic horse alive today, Pzrewalski’s horse has a slightly different genetic makeup than the current domestic species, although the two can still mate and produce fertile offspring. It was named for Nicholai Pzrewalski, a Russian geographer/explorer of Polish ancestry who noted the unique horse in 1879 as he passed through China on his way to Tibet as part of an expedition for Alexander the Second.

It’s thought the species once lived on grasslands throughout eastern Europe and Asia, from Germany across the steppes of Russia to Mongolia and China. This stocky, little horse -it weighed only about 300 kilograms and was just 13 hands or 132 centimetres high at the shoulder- with its golden-brown coat, long black tail and stiff black mane like a Mohawk haircut, lived in small groups of up to ten, called harems. It was the quintessential patriarchal arrangement: one dominant male bred with all the breeding age females. Bullied by the alpha stallion, other males didn’t get to breed. By the time Pzrewalski saw the species in the late 19th century, its numbers were already thinning, the victim of meat hunting, pressure from agriculture, and competition with domestic grazing animals. It would survive on the vast Asian plains for less than a century longer.
In the late 1960's the very last Pzrewalski’s horse in the wild died in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. But that wasn’t the end of it’s story. Seventy years earlier a small number of the horses were collected for zoos around the world. The process of capturing such high-spirited animals was  difficult. Foals provided the best “return on investment” because they were still young and would live a long time in a zoo environment. Often captured at the expense of the rest of the harem, which would be shot, foals were left undefended, confused and more easily taken by barbaric collectors.
Ironically, these captive animals would ultimately save the Pzrewalski’s horse as a species. But extinction threatened even the early captive horses. Spread amongst zoos and collections across in the globe, there was no single herd large enough to effectively increase the population. To make matters worse, an early group of captive animals in the United States didn’t survive and another important herd living in the Ukraine was shot by German soldiers during their occupation of the country during Word War II. By 1945 about thirty captive Pzrewalski’s horses survived around the world. Only thirteen of these were capable of breeding.
In 1959 new breeding programs were established in Europe and the United States. These efforts were coordinated through the use of an international studbook to keep track of which animals bred with which. By the mid-1970s there were 250 Pzrewalski’s horses living in captivity, despite passing through a genetic bottleneck of just thirteen breeding animals a few decades before. Every Pzrewalski’s Horse in existence today can thank the contribution made by that baker’s dozen of ancestors. It was a very close call.
In 1992, a program to re-introduce Pzrewalski’s horses back into the wilds of Mongolia was begun. It was a success. The species is now protected across its range. Today there are over 300 of these wild horses running free in three grassland reserves in Mongolia. Although it is still critically endangered, Pzrewalski’s horse is no longer listed as “Extinct in the Wild”. Another 2000 or so live in zoos and breeding facilities throughout the world.