Elephant bird determined that "Vorombe titan" reached weights of and stood tall, making it the world's largest bird, slightly larger than the much older "Dromornis stirtoni". Elephant birds have been extinct since at least the 17th century. Étienne de Flacourt, a French governor of Madagascar in the 1640s and 1650s, mentions an ostrich-like bird said to inhabit unpopulated regions, though it is unclear whether he was repeating folk tales passed on from generations earlier. In 1659, Flacourt wrote of the "vouropatra – a large bird which haunts the Ampatres and lays eggs like the ostriches; so that the people of these places
Boatswain Bird Island feral cat eradication program, alongside a rat eradication program, to encourage the birds back to the main island. The island has been identified as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International as a breeding site for seabirds. Birds for which the IBA is significant include Madeiran storm petrels (1500 breeding pairs), red-billed tropicbirds (500 pairs), white-tailed tropicbirds (1000 pairs), Ascension frigatebirds (6000 pairs), masked boobies (1300 pairs) and black noddies (5000 pairs). Boatswain Bird Island Boatswain Bird Island, also spelt Boatswainbird Island, is a small island some 270 m off the east coast of Ascension Island in the South