Continuum

Suspended overhead, a paper White-bellied Heron with a two and a half metre wingspan holds a flock of smaller herons in formation beneath its outstretched wings. One bird carries the return of many.

The White-bellied Heron (Ardea insignis) is the world’s second largest heron and its most endangered. It stands close to a metre tall, dark grey with a white throat and belly and two lace-like plumes at the nape, and it sits on the list of the hundred most Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered species on earth: a bird with almost no close relatives and very little time. It holds on in just three of its former range states, Bhutan, north-east India and Myanmar. It is extinct in Nepal, believed gone from Bangladesh, and a single captive bird identified in Yunnan hints that it may still survive in China. Published estimates put the wild population between 50 and 249 mature birds, the uncertainty in the range is because no full census has ever been done. Those closest to the observation of the species think the true figure sits near the bottom of it. Fewer than five actively breeding pairs are known anywhere in the world.

It will nest only along fast, undisturbed rivers running through subtropical and temperate forest, which is the same country wanted for hydropower, sand extraction and settlement. Bhutan holds close to half the remaining birds and has built a national effort around them. The Royal Society for Protection of Nature has counted them annually since 2009 and opened the White-bellied Heron Conservation Centre at Tsirang in 2021. A first attempt at captive rearing failed in 2023. In 2024, working with a Japanese team from Hosei University, Ueno Zoological Gardens, Omiya Park Small Zoo and the Hyogo Park of the Oriental White Stork, two hand-reared chicks reached adulthood and took the founding captive population to five. Bhutan’s 2026 count, twenty-six birds in the wild and five in care, is the highest recorded in more than twenty years. Behind that sits an IUCN working group formed in 2015 to pull isolated researchers into a single effort, a conservation action plan running to 2031, and an international conference convened this year across the range states.

Of the animals in this series the heron is the closest to the edge, and the one whose return is still being built. McLachlan’s work honours that effort, and turns artifice into attention and understanding, which the artist hopes becomes further action.