migrates to southwestern Iran, but wandering vagrants have been seen as far south as Oman (rare, but regular) and as far north as the Caspian coasts of Kazakhstan and Russia (before 1945). Africa It was formerly found in North Africa including Egypt, where it was commonly venerated and mummified as a votive offering to the god Thoth. For many centuries until the Roman period the main temples buried a few dozen of thousands of birds a year, and to sustain sufficient numbers for the demand for sacrifices by pilgrims from all over Egypt, it was for some time believed that ibis breeding farms (called ibiotropheia by Herodotus) existed. Aristotle mentions in c. 350 BC that many sacred ibises are found all over Egypt. Strabo, writing around 20 AD, mentions large amounts of the birds in the streets of Alexandria, where he was living at the time; picking through the trash, attacking provisions, and defiling everything with their dung. Pierre Belon notes the many ibises in Egypt during his travels there in the late 1540s (he thought they were an odd type of stork). Benoît de Maillet, in his Description de l'Egypte (1735) relates that at the turn of the 17th century, when the great caravans travelled yearly to Mecca, great clouds of ibises would follow them from Egypt for over a hundred leagues into the desert to feed on the dung left at the encampments. By 1850, however, the species had disappeared from Egypt both as a breeding and migrant population, with the last, albeit questionable, sighting in 1864. An examination of the genetic diversity among mummified ibises suggested that there was no reduction in genetic diversity as would be caused if they were bred in captivity and further studies on isotopes suggest that the birds were not just wild caught but came from a wide geographic range. The species did not breed in southern Africa before the beginning of the 20th century, but it has benefited from irrigation, dams, and commercial agricultural practices such as dung heaps, carrion and refuse tips. It began to breed in the early 20th century, and in the 1970s the first colonies of ibises were recorded in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Its population for example expanded 2-3-fold during the period between 1972 and 1995 in Orange Free State. It is now found throughout southern Africa. The species is a common resident in most parts