Italian Vet Clinic Gets A Visit From A VERY Unusual Wild Bird

They're so rare, people are flying out on gliders to reintroduce them to the wild.

People in Italy just had the privilege of meeting a very rare kind of bird.

The northern bald ibis was nearly hunted to extinction in the 17th century and pretty much disappeared from Europe, the bird's native land. 

When passersby saw this bird on a lake in Italy, they thought he looked so weird that he might be sick, so they helped him to a local vet, Clinica Veterinaria della Tuscia, just north of Rome.

Luckily, this northern bald ibis is perfectly fine — the onlookers just had never seen a bird who looked and behaved like this incredibly rare bird. 

But people are hopefully going to see more and more of them, thanks to one of the largest European species conservation projects.

"In spring 2013 the worldwide population of free living northern bald ibisses with intact migratory behavior was reduced to one single individual in the Middle East," Waldrappteam, the project facilitating a major cooperative effort to bring back the bird, wrote. "This means that the northern bald ibis as migratory bird species is factually extinct."

The program breeds northern bald ibisses at an Austrian zoo and then helps them learn to migrate into the wild. They way this is done is nothing short of amazing.

Human beings get in special gliders to help lead migrations of the rare birds into the lands where they were once hunted to extinction.

click to play video

They never should have disappeared to begin with — but the lengths people are going to bring these birds back are truly inspiring.

To help the northern bald ibis, you can symbolically adopt one of the birds being reintroduced to the wild.