Mountaineers' mission uses decoys to pull back bald ibis from the edge of extinction

Three British mountaineers have completed a remarkable climbing feat to help one of the world's most critically endangered birds, the bald ibis.

Three British mountaineers have completed a remarkable climbing feat to help one of the world's most critically endangered birds, the bald ibis.

The scruffy but striking-looking large waders, which once bred in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and across the Middle East, have now been reduced to fewer than 250 individuals nesting in sea cliffs in Morocco.

Since 1993 the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has been assisting the Moroccan government with conservation of the remaining birds in the Souss-Massa national park, and for this coming nesting season, with the ibises down to 60 breeding pairs, the RSPB and the Moroccan authorities decided to give them a special helping hand.

Long-abandoned breeding ledges have been newly cleared on the cliffs and, to encourage the birds to use the sites, decoy ibises have been installed.

The scheme was easier to dream up than to fulfil on the crumbling 250ft sandy cliff faces with a pronounced overhang. The RSPB called in three expert climbers, Diana Taylor and Tony Howard, who run an adventure travel company in Oldham, and Mick Shaw, who runs a building firm in Manchester, all specialists in climbing and mountain exploration in the Middle East and North Africa. They gave their services free and spent two days abseiling down the cliffs, directed by the RSPB's project leader Chris Bowden, to clear the ledges and install the decoys, which had been made in England and taken out to Morocco.

Local national park wardens are now waiting to see if the new ledges will attract more of the birds, which are among the world's rarest. Bald on their crowns, with aMohican-like tuft of feathers sticking out behind and long red decurved bills, they are unmistakable, and attractive in an ungainly way, their bodies metallic dark-green with a violet sheen on the wings.

Once there were breeding populations across much of Eastern Europe and the Levant, but by 1900 they had disappeared from much of their range.

In the 20th-century colonies were extinguished in Syria and Algeria, largely by hunting. Most dramatically, the colony at Birecik in Turkey, which contained nearly 800 pairs in 1954, was down to 65 pairs 10 years later, and finally disappeared in 1989. The mass decline in the Fifties has been attributed to pesticides.

The birds in Morocco, which occupy three nesting sites in the national park and another one further north, are all that remain.

"We just hope the decoys now attract the real thing," said Mick Shaw, who happens to be an expert in fitting model birds in difficult locations: Manchester City Council has employed him to fit ceramic parrots and other species to buildings in the city's Tib Street regeneration area.