An effort to bring the heath hen back into existence is now the leading de-extinction project in the world, putting the Vineyard at the forefront of new technology in wildlife conservation.

The first phase of a ground-breaking project to bring the heath hen back from extinction has been successfully completed, scientists said this week. The path to bringing back the bird is getting more tangible, and scientists say the heath hen could be “the gateway bird” for avian de-extinction.

The last heath hen disappeared from Martha's Vineyard in 1932 and the species declared extinct in 1933.

The heath hen’s story of decline and extinction has become inextricably linked to Martha’s Vineyard.

The heath hen is at the center of a new effort and a new debate on the Island, as scientific advances have made de-extinction a possibility.

The heath hen is currently being proposed as a possibility for de-extinction by an organization that aims to coordinate projects that use genetics to rescue endangered and extinct species.

Now a genetic study of the skins of scores of heath hens, all of them from the Vineyard, shows that the Island bird, although it looked and behaved much like its supposed parent species in the Midwest, was a wholly distinctive creature. Genetically it was more different from the greater western prairie chicken - that supposed parent species - than the Midwestern bird is from any other family member in its genus, which includes the lesser prairie chicken, the endangered Attwater's prairie chicken of eastern Texas, and even the sharp-tailed grouse. It is possible that instead of being a subspecies of the prairie chicken - which scientists have considered it to be since it was first typed in the last years of the nineteenth century - the heath hen might have been a species unto itself.