The point we are making is that there is no point in breeding and releasing birds back into a habitat or environment which will not sustain them. It is an expensive waste of time and effort as well as being potentially cruel. Significantly, most programmes were implemented around the same period before the world had learnt that breed and release was no panacea. To be fair, when you were surrounded by feral birds which got established either by deliberate or accidental release, it all looked simple, so was an easy trap to fall into. In fact I was a whisker from being caught up in a programme myself. My long time friend Professor Stewart Evans had done a census of the Royal Parrot Finch in Vanuatu and discovered that it now only existed on 4 of the total 84 islands that make up the archipelago. This was down from its previous distribution of 14 islands. We went a long way


20 BIRD SCENE


toward getting permission to trap some of the precious wild stock for a breed and release programme and only dropped the idea when it all got embroiled in politics. We were totally naive; despite a number of attempts over the years, no one had even managed to establish a captive bred stock of Royals, never mind trying to reintroduce them back into the wild and we had no idea why they were declining!! It may help the reader towards a better understanding of Breed and Release if we provide a synopsis of our work, together with some of our logic and conclusions and the background against which we are working. With all this background knowledge gained from the heart breaking work of others, we decided to first put in the hard yards and implement a thorough research programme to properly understand why the Gouldian Finch was declining before wasting scarce money trying to


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