Raso Lark Translocation & Predator Control — Santa Luzia Nature Reserve (Cabo Verde)

The Raso Lark is a Critically Endangered songbird historically confined to a single 7 km² islet, Raso, in Cabo Verde's Barlavento group — a single-island endemism that leaves the species acutely vulnerable to any one catastrophic event (drought, disease, an introduced predator). From 2017, SPEA (Sociedade Portuguesa para o Estudo das Aves, BirdLife's Portuguese partner), the Cabo Verdean NGO Biosfera 1 and Cabo Verde's Directorate-General for Environment (DNA) began feral cat eradication on the neighbouring 35 km² island of Santa Luzia, funded by a MAVA Foundation grant to SPEA, as part of a wider ecological restoration of the Santa Luzia Nature Reserve (within the roughly 11,000-hectare Santa Luzia Marine Protected Area).

With Santa Luzia assessed as sufficiently predator-controlled, the partners translocated 37 Raso Larks from Raso to Santa Luzia in April 2018, working with Raso Lark specialist Dr Mike Brooke. By March 2019, around 20 larks were recorded on Santa Luzia — 5 from the original release, 2 further colour-ringed birds that had flown over from Raso, and 12 unmarked birds, including some hatched on Santa Luzia itself — confirming that the released birds had bred and that their annual survival was comparable to the source population on Raso. A follow-up translocation later moved a further 33 larks (19 males, 14 females) to broaden the founder population's genetic base. The project was published as a conservation-translocation case study in the IUCN journal PARKS, giving it documented value for other single-island-endemic recovery efforts.

A related BirdLife-reported monitoring effort on the nearby islets of Raso, Branco and Rombo recorded no seabird predation over a two-and-a-half-year period, in a region where invasive fire ants, rats, mice and feral cats and dogs are the main identified threats to Cabo Verde's seabirds.

As an honest caveat, the cat-eradication component on Santa Luzia itself was interrupted when the island was evacuated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the most detailed account reviewed (Earth Optimism/Cambridge Conservation) describes the ultimate outcome of that eradication as uncertain — meaning the long-term security of the reintroduced lark population against residual or reintroduced cats has not been independently confirmed in the sources available. This is best read as a documented translocation and breeding success running ahead of a fully confirmed invasive-predator removal.

Read the full analysis: https://www.birdlife.org/news/2018/07/06/ground-breaking-reintroduction-for-cabo-verdes-most-threatened-bird/