The bird that came back from seven.

The crested ibis once bred across Japan, Korea, the Russian far east and most of eastern China; by the late 1970s it was presumed extinct in the wild everywhere. The search that found the last seven birds — in a pine on a hillside above Yaojiagou village, Yangxian county, on 23 May 1981 — is one of the founding stories of Chinese conservation, and so is what came after: a protection order in the valley, round-the-clock watches at the nest trees, and then the decision that made it work. The birds feed in rice paddies, so Yangxian banned agricultural pesticides county-wide and built its farm economy around organic rice instead.

The result is the best conservation comeback in Asia. From seven birds the population passed a hundred in 2000 and a thousand in 2010; by the end of 2025, the global count exceeded twelve thousand, the species had been down-listed from Critically Endangered, and descendants of Yangxian stock now breed in Japan and Korea as well as across fifteen Chinese provinces. And unlike almost every other recovery story, the wild bird is visible to a traveller: ibis feed in ordinary working paddies along the county's roads, through most of the year.