Efforts to save the Middle East?s rarest bird have been boosted by two chance sightings of the species 1,500 miles apart.
Northern Bald Ibises were seen last month in the Jordan Valley for the first time in 13 years, and in Djibouti, east Africa, for the first time ever, raising hopes that numbers of this species are not as low as scientists fear.
The bird was thought extinct in the Middle East in the 1990s before a colony of just six birds was found in Palmyra, Syria in 2002. Since then, adult and young birds have been fitted with satellite tags by the RSPB and BirdLife Middle East, to try to discover and protect their migration routes and wintering sites. The tagged adult birds are currently in Ethiopia for the winter.