I’m training to be an engineer can i take ibuprofen every day while breastfeeding Yet in 1980 the human team striving to save the species from extinction had little to celebrate in her performance. Old Blue was nine before she started to breed successfully, sometimes producing three broods a year. It was partly the intensive and exceptional midwifery of her human support team that brought about the gradual increase in the species’ numbers. The project relied upon taking eggs from the robins and placing them first under Chatham gerygones that were nesting wild close by, and then later in the nests of the archipelago’s endemic race of tomtits (chathamensis). However, these surrogate tomtit parents nested on an entirely different island (South East) that was a 12.4-mile boat ride away. The precision timing of the journey from one island to another with partly incubated eggs was only one detail in the critical and delicate coordination involved in the entire operation. For example, the team had to ensure that the robins’ eggs’ development was carefully matched to the stage of incubation achieved by the tomtit foster patents. Another part of the project involved actually destroying the now eggless nests of the black robins, because that would encourage them to build a new nest and lay fresh eggs and, thus, double or treble their productivity. One senses the deep grain of understatement present in the words of these rigorous men of science when they write, ‘Removing the eggs and destroying the nests of one of the world’s rarest birds, with no guarantee of success in fostering or encouraging re-laying, proved very stressful for the team. The men ost much sleep during those first critical days, for if the gamble failed, they would surely be blamed for hastening the extinction of the species.’
