Endangered
Crested Ibis
Nipponia nippon
Crested Ibis is a bird in the family Threskiornithidae (order Pelecaniformes) — Nipponia nippon, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
It is a medium-sized to large ibis, 55–78.5 cm (21.7–30.9 in) long, with a bare red face, and a dense crest of plumes on the nape. The plumage varies with seasons. In winter, it is largely white with salmon-pink tones on the wings and tail; in summer, it is pale grey above and on the breast, with a darker grey shawl across its back, and white with a salmon-pink tinge below. In flight, the upper side of the wings and tail are white. The underside of the flight feathers on the wing and tail are strongly flushed pink.
Range and habitat
The crested ibis inhabits temperate mountain forests and hilly regions, and is frequently active near rice paddies, riverbanks, ponds, marshes, and mountain streams. It typically nests in tall trees close to wetlands. The crested ibis was once widely distributed in China, spanning the Ussuri River basin and Lake Xingkai in Heilongjiang Province, northeastern China. Eastern, central, and western Jilin Province; dalian, Jin County, and Yingkou on the Liaodong Peninsula in Liaoning Province; hebei Province; western Henan Province; shandong Province; southeastern Shaanxi Province; mount Taiabai and Yangxian County in southern Shaanxi Province; lanzhou and southeastern Huixian in Gansu, Anhui, Qu County in Zhejiang, as well as Fuzhou and Hainan Island.
Reintroduction programs have since established populations in South Korea and in Japan on Sado Island and the Noto Peninsula.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The crested ibis is generally solitary and quiet, vocalizing mainly when taking flight and rarely during other activities. Crested ibises are diurnal, spending the day foraging in wetlands and roosting at night in tall trees.
Crested ibis's diet usually consists of small fish, loaches, frogs, crabs, shrimp, snails, crickets, earthworms, beetles, hemipteran insects, crustaceans, and other invertebrates and small vertebrates such as insect larvae. Foraging occurs during daylight hours. Japanese crested ibis at www.biodic.go.jp Breeding season is from March to May.
In crisis
The crested ibis was once widespread across eastern China, the Korean Peninsula, and Japan, but by the late 20th century its wild population had become restricted to Yangxian in Shaanxi Province, China. The last wild crested ibis in Japan died in October 2003, with the remaining wild population found only in Shaanxi Province of China, until the reintroduction of captive bred birds back into Japan in 2008. In the 1980s, the birds were decimated by overhunting, the use of pesticides, ongoing habitat loss, their already small population size, their limited range, winter starvation and persecution, that together brought the endangered species to the brink of extinction.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix I. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Crested Ibis is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Crested Ibis, Wikidata item Q493173. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
