Gaze of the Paradise Fly Catcher

Ebony Forest

Mauritius has lost nearly all of the forest it started with. Something under two per cent of the island still carries native cover, and most of that is held down by introduced plants that outgrow anything endemic. Ebony Forest, on the mountainside above Chamarel, works the other way around: invaders cleared by hand, hundreds of thousands of endemic seedlings put back in their place, and the birds that came through the last four centuries given somewhere to return to. The Mauritius fody and the olive white-eye have both been released under this canopy.

Restored forest is close, dim work the light arrives broken up and the birds keep to the middle distance. Shot across one morning on the reserve, 26 November.