The Vietnam Pheasant Recovery Programme: reintroducing a species after 100 years under human care

The ‘Search for Lost Birds’ initiative, launched in 2021 as a collaboration between the American Bird Conservancy, Re:wild and BirdLife International (https://searchforlostbirds.org/), is, among other things, seeking to sensitise the conservation-minded public to species which are believed or hoped to be extant but have vanished from recent view and need urgently—for their own good—to be found. ‘What do we mean by “lost”?’, asks the website, answering with a definition intended to cover all animals and plants: ‘a lost species is one not confirmed alive by photographic, audio or genetic information for over 10 years in the wild and has no ex situ population under human care’. The first example it then gives of a species thus disqualified from further consideration is Lophura edwardsi, what we now call Vietnam Pheasant.