The hunt for the world's rarest duck

National Geographic

21-07-2025

The dogged search for a bird that many people figured had gone extinct included torrential rains, washed-out bridges, swine flu, and unrelenting obsession. Known by locals as fotsimaso, or white eye, the Madagascar pochard is a diver. Like other diving ducks—and unlike dabbling ducks—their legs are farther back on their bodies, which helps propel them underwater and makes them appear more upright than dabblers when standing. They are the only ducks in their genus (Aythya) that live almost entirely on invertebrates, with a particular fondness for mothlike caddis flies that breed in the vegetation surrounding lakes. In flight, the critically endangered birds reveal pale bellies and white underwings. Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic Photo Ark, PHOTOGRAPHED AT DURRELL WILDLIFE CONSERVATION TRUST IN ANTANANARIVO, MADAGASCAR
The Madagascar pochard, compared with other ducks, has little to crow about. It's a medium-size, rust-colored duck with neither the dramatic beak of a king eider nor the brilliant plumage of a mandarin. Its primary physical distinction lies with the male, whose eyes turn white as the duck matures.
But for a small group of scientists, it's an obsession.
The duck is only found in Madagascar, a biodiversity hot spot—more than 85 percent of the country's plants and animals exist nowhere else. The island's oddities include baobab trees that resemble giant mushrooms, lemurs as small as a stick of butter, and a palm-size creature called the lowland streaked tenrec, for which every day looks like a bad hair day.
A century ago the Madagascar pochard was a common sight on Lake Alaotra, the country's largest lake, where sprawling wetlands once swarmed with chameleons, lemurs, fish, frogs, and fossas—slender, catlike carnivores also only found in Madagascar.
Over the decades, however, the lake's marshes and surrounding areas were converted to rice fields, forests were burned to make way for other crops, and the wetlands were transformed into agricultural heartlands.
In 1960 a single flock of pochards was all that could be found on the lake. After that, the species seemed to vanish.
In the 1980s Olivier Langrand, a French ornithologist, was researching a book on Madagascar's birds with his partner, biologist Lucienne Wilmé. Over a yearlong search, they traversed the island in carts pulled by humpbacked cows called zebus, camped in the mud, and hiked in relentless rain. They identified over a hundred bird species, not one of them a pochard.
(These flamboyant birds are the 17,000th species to enter Nat Geo's Photo Ark.)
In the late '80s, Langrand met Glyn Young, a zookeeper with the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in the United Kingdom with a growing interest in waterfowl. Young recounts that Langrand offered to help him embark on his own expedition to find the duck. 'Olivier was particularly keen on the pochard because it was one of the very few birds he'd never seen in Madagascar,' recalls Young. The pochard was one of Madagascar's rarest and most threatened bird species, and that, for a bird scientist, is not something to let disappear without a fight. 'He wanted somebody to spend significant amounts of time looking for it.'
Young happily obliged. For seven weeks, Young and a colleague paddled across Lake Alaotra in dugout canoes and visited villages, where they were offered plenty of homemade rum but little information about the duck. 'We couldn't find any ducks, or any hope for them.'
Things didn't end there. Instead, for Young, 'That's how the obsession started.' It would span 30 years, thousands of miles, and the birth of his first child, whom he named Aythya (after the duck's scientific name, Aythya innotata).
Wilmé also returned to the hunt. Conditions for the pochard's survival were bleak, she recalls. Fires smoldered as people cleared forests around the lake to plant rice fields. Fowlers strung nets across the water to catch waterbirds, a hundred at a time, to sell in the markets to the country's quickly growing population. None held a pochard. Wilmé, who was pregnant at the time, had to hire rowers to help her explore the lake.
'I spent many hours on the lake—in canoes, walking the marshes, working with local fishermen,' she says. 'If you were a pochard, where would you go where you could be absent from threats and people?' Such a place, it seemed to Wilmé, 'didn't exist anymore.' She printed pictures of the pochard on T-shirts and flyers, distributing them in villages and schools. The word was out. In 1991 Wilmé's campaign yielded a surprise. A fowler caught a duck he'd never seen before and showed it to other duck hunters and fishermen in the area. None of them recognized it. But they did remember the public campaign and advised the fowler to bring it to Wilmé.
It was a male pochard.
Wilmé's account in the Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club was hopeful: 'The finding of a single Madagascar pochard on Lake Alaotra indicates a remnant population may still exist.'
The discovery launched a yearlong search of a wider area around Lake Alaotra in hopes of finding a remnant population of the birds. No success. And the single duck, cared for in a special aviary with a fenced-in pond, died in 1992. A necropsy conducted by London Zoo and Chicago Field Museum specialists indicated that an aerial fungus may have afflicted the duck. Once he was gone, it seemed the species was lost again—this time for good.
Over a decade later, in 2004, the pochard's obituary was tentatively pronounced. At London's Linnean Society, it was biologist Young who reluctantly raised the possibility that the pochard's classification might include the dreaded words 'probably extinct.'
Yet the pochard might just be the world's most indomitable duck.
In 2006 Lily-Arison Rene de Roland, a raptor expert and national director of the Peregrine Fund's Madagascar program (and, as of 2023, a National Geographic Explorer), hiked into a forest with a local guide and cook in a remote area of northern Madagascar to research its wildlife, with a special interest in an increasingly rare and vulnerable bird of prey called the Madagascar marsh harrier.
Just two days into what he thought would be an expedition lasting several weeks, he spotted a small blue lake inside an extinct volcanic crater. When he lifted his binoculars, he spied something else: a flock of pochards. Nine adults and four ducklings.
The harrier would have to wait. Rene de Roland snapped some photos and raced back to his team, who at first couldn't understand why they needed to urgently pack up and reverse course. 'I explained to them: The pochard is extinct. We need to confirm the photo to our boss in the U.S.,' he says. They traveled for two days back to a spot with internet connection to email his photos of the pochards to the Peregrine Fund's headquarters in Idaho. The photos were pinged across to the Atlantic to Young, who would quickly board a plane—once again, and this time with great hope—to Madagascar.
Three groups—the Peregrine Fund, the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, and the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust—almost immediately began working with Madagascar's government to get the lake recognized as a protected site. The groups trained locals to work as field staff, monitoring the flock until a breeding program could be established.
'When a species is so incredibly rare that there is only one tiny, remnant population, it's easy to think they are living there because it's a good environment for them, and that's why they've survived,' explains Young, who now chairs the Threatened Waterfowl Specialist Group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. But the truth was simpler—and grimmer. 'They have nowhere else to go.'
Fearing that a single catastrophic event could wipe out the fragile flock, experts hatched a plan: They would collect pochard eggs, raise ducklings in captivity, and release them in a different lake, thus establishing a second population of Madagascar pochards in the wild.
Easier said than done.
First, egg collection had to happen in the dry season—the only three months when dirt paths to the remote volcanic lake were traversable. To let the eggs incubate with the parents as long as possible, the team of scientists, including species recovery and breeding experts from the three organizations, planned to arrive a few days before the ducklings hatched and wait until the final day before hatching to take the eggs. That way they'd be incubated by the parents as long as possible. Any further delay, however, would increase the possibility that the eggs would hatch and ducklings would dart into the reeds, never to be found.
The first delay struck over the Indian Ocean, where a storm forced the team's flight back to Kenya. By the time they reached Madagascar two days later, several members of the team had contracted swine flu. A swollen river had washed out a bridge, leading to a further delay. Finally, a 15-hour drive in trucks laden with generators, heat lamps, portable incubators, and duckling crumb—pellets of ground duck food bolstered with vitamins and protein—got them to a highland hotel in the town of Antsohihy, where they would establish a base camp by persuading the owner to let them turn one room into a temporary duck-breeding facility. Their final stretch: eight hours on a rutted oxcart path eroded by rain.
The delayed team arrived the night before the ducks were due to hatch. They set up tents and a campsite incubator. The next morning, as they walked toward the lake, awaiting a blessing of a village elder, they saw a different very rare bird pass over their heads—the Madagascar marsh harrier. It dove straight into the reeds. The horror of what was happening struck them as the soon-to-be-endangered harrier rose with a thought-to-be-extinct species of duckling in its talons.
The team thought they had 'blown it,' recalls Peter Cranswick, project manager for the pochard effort with the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, an organization that in the 1950s pioneered captive-breeding techniques to help save the world's rarest goose, the Hawaiian nene. The eggs had already hatched, the rare ducklings had scattered, and one was already dead and being carried off.
The team, sitting disconsolate at the side of the lake, had been recording the morning's mission. A distraught Young spoke into the video camera. 'We've always thought that harriers were potentially the biggest threat,' he said, his voice catching.
But two of the team members paddled out to investigate. Minutes later, they radioed back. The eggs were still in the nest. The dead duckling was from a different—and unknown—clutch of eggs.
Eight eggs were collected, and they hatched that night inside the campsite incubator. 'We know that for 48 hours they are tough,' Young says. 'They are living on reserves from being in the egg. That's why we move them in that window.' By daybreak, eight pochard ducklings were traveling in a heavily padded, mesh-covered cooler along that rutted road toward a new life—one focused on keeping their species alive. The 'least worst option'
By 2012 the number of captive-bred ducks had grown from eight to some four dozen, and the team began looking for the ducks' new home. After surveying over 24 lakes and finding all heavily farmed and fished, they settled on Lake Sofia, the 'least worst option,' according to Cranswick. Fifteen thousand people in eight villages lived around Lake Sofia at the time, a fraction of the population around other lakes. Chances were as good as they got.
Cranswick details one early meeting with farmers to enlist their support for the project. One farmer stood up and said he heard the foreigners were doing all these things for the villages because they wanted to put a duck on the lake. There were concerns. Does this duck eat rice? No. Will the ducks fly into farmers' rice fields? No. Would this big project help them protect their own resources? The answer was yes. Cranswick recalls the farmer thinking it over for a moment before agreeing to help. 'OK,' he said. 'Bring the duck!'
Lake Sofia, as well as the remote volcanic lake, would soon be protected by the government, globally recognized on the Ramsar Convention's list of Wetlands of International Importance. Land rights for farmers would see great protections as well.
Over the next five years the local community, scientists, and government collaborated to make Lake Sofia as healthy as possible. They introduced farming techniques that reduced the use of pesticides, planted trees, adopted fishing practices with less impact on waterbirds, and created loan programs to encourage climate-smart agriculture.
The first ever captive-bred flock of pochards was released in 2018 on Lake Sofia.
'It's just a small brown duck,' says Sarah-Louise Adams, delivery and impact manager for field programs at the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. But it's 'a flagship species to restore an entire wetland.'
Eighty descendants from that flock and others that have been released are now living on Lake Sofia, and in 2023 six ducks that had flown from there were spotted at their ancestral home, Lake Alaotra, prompting excited bulletins from scientists. But the fight to keep their population growing and their wetlands healthy remains a struggle. Last year Lake Sofia shrunk from a surface area of over 500 acres to less than two acres, just 15 inches deep, after heavy storms damaged the banks of the lake, causing it to drain.
In December the community raced to build a temporary dam from sticks and mud before the rainy season hit, maintaining the lake with stored rainwater until a permanent dam could be built. That new dam has since replenished much of the lake.
Other challenges remain. An expedition last year to bring more pochards into the breeding program from the volcanic lake failed when scientists found just three nests; two were ravaged by rats and one was flooded. The road to the lake is also eroding further. The aim later this year is to hike the nearly 30 miles in and out with lighter, temperature-controlled hatchling boxes for eggs and ducklings to avoid the stress of the bumpy drive on the birds.
Thanks to decades of work, there are now, as of this writing, an estimated 230 Madagascar pochards in existence. Biologist Young, one of the leaders of the effort, is now retired but continues to monitor the pochards' recovery. He is hopeful about other thought-to-be-extinct ducks—possibly in the far reaches of Russia, North Korea, and Myanmar—that fascinate scientists like him. 'Every now and again there are reports, unfortunately never photographs,' he says. One, the crested shelduck, has a tuft of green feathers on its head; the duck in in Myanmar is pink-headed. 'We always thought that if someone rediscovered the pink-headed duck, nobody would remember the pochard,' Young says. 'It is a beautiful duck.' Luckily, the pochard has very devout champions.
As Langrand, the ornithologist who first began the search in the early '80s, says, if you look behind any story of saving a species, you'll find devoted people, from scientists and government officials to farmers, fowlers, and dambuilders. 'It takes individuals to carry the torch from beginning to end.' A version of this story appears in the August 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.