African sacred ibis

Voice

Largely silent. At the colony and at the roost it gives a hoarse, blowing kwaar and a dull croaking; feeding birds make almost no sound beyond the rush of their wings. Nestlings keep up a thin piping that carries from a distance as a hiss over the colony.

Identification

About the size of a Spoonbill, white, with a sharply contrasting, wholly unfeathered black head and neck and a long, thick, downcurved black bill. Loose, hair-fine black ornamental plumes lie along the folded wing and fall as a dark plume over the tail end. In flight a narrow black margin shows along the trailing edge of the wing and the primary tips are black; it flies with neck and legs extended, alternating quick beats with glides, often in line. Immatures have a feathered, grey-brown mottled neck, lack the ornamental plumes and look much less contrasting.

Confusion species

Eurasian Spoonbill is also large and white, but has a feathered white head and a straight bill with a spatulate tip, and is entirely white in flight. Great Egret is slimmer, has a straight pointed bill and flies with the neck drawn in rather than extended. White Stork is considerably bigger, with a red bill and red legs and a broad black wing panel instead of black tips only. The decisive feature stays the combination of a bare black head with a heavy curved bill; no other large white bird in Europe shows it.

Habitat

Shallow coastal and inland marsh, wet meadows, flooded arable land and rice fields, and estuary mudflats; in France also refuse tips and the surroundings of fish ponds and gull and tern colonies. It feeds by walking over short open vegetation and in shallow water and is not fussy: crayfish, insects, worms, refuse, and in colonies also eggs and young birds.

Range and movements

The species breeds naturally across Africa south of the Sahara, with a small population beyond that in the marshes of southern Iraq; in Egypt, where it was venerated in antiquity, it disappeared around the middle of the nineteenth century. Its European presence goes back to birds that escaped from bird parks: from the 1970s they settled on the French Atlantic coast, peaking at several thousand birds, and from 1989 in the rice fields of Piedmont and Lombardy. Culling has reduced the French total to a few hundred, while the Italian population is still growing and spreading south. In Britain and the Netherlands only single birds turn up, usually from France.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• Migration direction
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

The most reliable ground is northern Italy: in March or April drive the freshly flooded rice fields between Vercelli and Novara and you will find dozens of birds among the Black-headed Gulls. In France winter in the Marais de Brouage or on the Golfe du Morbihan offers the best chance, preferably early in the morning as the birds move from roost to pasture. In Spain the species is not one to plan for; the odd bird appears on the Catalan coast.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened (IUCN: Least Concern); the world population is put at a few hundred thousand birds and is slowly falling. In Europe the species is not a subject of protection but of management: because free-living Sacred Ibises take eggs and chicks from colonies of terns, herons and spoonbills, France has culled them systematically since 2007, and the species is on the EU list of invasive alien species. In Italy management has stayed limited and numbers are rising.