Excerpted from the Proceedings of the International Aviculturists Society, January 11 - 15, 1995, Orlando, FL.
The Bigger They Are, the Harder They Fall
or
How Body Size Affects the Conservation Status of New World
Parrots
by Charles A. Munn, Ph.D.
V. What the International Aviculturists Society, World Parrot Trust, and Wildlife Conservation Society have done with your contributions in 1994 to stop the decline of some of the world's rarest and most beautiful large macaws.
The most crucial conservation action that is required for endangered large New World parrots to maintain or recover to safe population levels is to restrict the activities of roving trappers and hunters, and that is exactly what your contributions have allowed us to do. You should be proud to learn that your contributions at the January, 1994, IAS meeting in West Palm Beach made it possible for "your" field biologists (who include me and several university-trained Bolivians and Brazilians) to stop the trapping of rare macaws by local bird trappers in Bolivia and Brazil. In both countries, your teams went undercover to find the most energetic, ambitious, hard-working local bird trappers. In both countries, your teams negotiated and recently hammered out agreements with these skilled trappers to pay them modest monthly salaries to protect the very same rare macaws that they used to trap for unscrupulous urban middlemen.
Surprisingly and encouragingly, these rural trappers in each case have turned out to be very poor, hard-working bird lovers not unlike you or me in terms of their fascination with birds, particularly parrots. I found that these trappers demonstrated an extraordinary depth of knowledge about the ecology and behavior of these birds. And also not unlike you and me, they love to watch and handle birds, especially parrots. Now that I have gotten to know these poor rural trappers, I am totally convinced that if these men had grown up in the U.S. with the educational and travel opportunities enjoyed by most middle class students, they almost certainly would have ended up in wildlife-oriented careers such as aviculture, veterinary medicine, field biology, wildlife management, park management, ecotourism, wildlife photography, or others. But when these men were born, such careers did not exist in the dirt-poor parts of Bolivia and Brazil. In those regions, ironically, the only way a wildlife enthusiasts could make enough money even to pay for a diet of beans and rice was to work as a rural wildlife trapper for wealthy and unscrupulous urban middlemen.
With your help, we have broken this vicious cycle of parrot destruction and made it possible for local parrot trappers to become parrot protectors. They now earn steady salaries of between 170 and 400 dollars per month (depending on the region and their work responsibilities). These salary levels may sound very low, but in fact, they have proven to be more than adequate to allow these humble, hardworking men to add to their family's diet adequate amounts of fresh fruit, vegetables , and cheese as well as occasional, tough goat meat or beef. With these salaries they also can now afford to pay the 5-10 dollars per month that each of their children needs for school supplies and clothes.
As part of the conversion of local parrot trappers to parrot protectors, we have recently purchased a used dirt bike to be used by one of our new parrot protectors for patrolling key points along 100 miles of dirt roads in Bolivia. Our parrot protector, whom WCS converted from trapper to protector two-and-a-half years ago with excellent results, is a very rugged and determined field man who is more than happy to earn a living by protecting active nests of Blue-throated Macaws. Recently a parrot smuggler who is a well-known middleman in a major Bolivian city contacted our macaw guard and tried to convince him to capture and sell the Blue-throated Macaws under our man's protection. Our man rebuffed the offer and told the smuggler to give up on any attempts to locate, trap, or buy birds of this species. The smuggler threatened our man, telling him that he might have an unfortunate accident if he tried to block him (the smuggler) from getting Blue-throated Macaws. Our man, who is a burly, field-hardened, bearlike fellow with a gentle disposition, replied calmly that the smuggler could say what he wanted, but he would never get near the wild birds. Our man informed me that this urban middleman is absurdly scared of the rain forest and certainly would not be able to locate or threaten any wild birds as long as he was on the job protecting them and patrolling. Furthermore, our man has many family members and friends in the towns and villages in the region that includes the macaw nests . Thus, no-one suspicious can visit the area without our man being tipped off immediately. Finally, the owners of the various gigantic properties on which the macaws are nesting are co-operating fully with our man, who can drive his dirt bike anywhere on their lands to protect the macaws.
In addition to the salary that our man receives for protecting the Blue-throated Macaws in intact habitat in Bolivia, he also recently has begun to make some substantial money as a consultant on macaw biology (recently for a group from Earthwatch that hired him during the non-nesting season to help them with radio tracking of small, non-endangered macaws) and as a sophisticated macaw guide for specialized birdwatching tours from Victor Emanuel Nature Tours of Austin, TX. This company so far has sent two groups of birders to central Bolivia in large part to see the Blue-throated Macaw in the wild. When our man witnessed tour participants weep, jump up and down, fall on the ground, and hug him frantically immediately after seeing the macaw, he became completely convinced that the survival of these rare macaws is essential to the continued growth of this sort of specialized tourism.
The sort of successful conversion from trapper to protector that we have witnessed in the case of our man in central Bolivia is really just a variant of similarly dramatic conversions that WCS macaw projects have brought about over the past ten years with former loggers, agriculturists, and meat hunters in the nearly completely intact forests of southeastern Amazonian Peru. In the case of these Peruvian projects, however, the conversion happened even more dramatically in that from one month to the next loggers and hunters switched to ecotourism as soon as they saw that it would bring them a more comfortable and less dangerous lifestyle.
In the most dramatic case of all in Peru, a young, poor Quechua Indian from a violence-wracked tropical valley in the central Andes of Peru came as a refugee to the tranquil Manu National Park in 1984. He started working for biologists as a laborer in 1984, joining my WCS macaw project in 1985 as a low-level assistant (he had a very good ear for identifying parrot calls). By late 1985 he told me that he couldn't believe that anyone could make a living by having so much fun studying and protecting animals. At that point he rejected a chance to return to his home valley to take up the farming of four acres of chocolate trees owned by his mother. Instead, he elected to intensify his work learning more about birds and the lowland rainforest of Manu. By 1989, he had learned English and could identify by sight and sound with their English and scientific names all of the 550 species of birds of the lowlands of the Manu Park. I advised him to leave my project, for he could earn more money guiding tourists to Manu than I could pay him with my modest WCS budgets. In that same year he teamed up with three other Quechua Indian friends who also were refugees from the violence of his home valley. They formed a small nature tour company and for an application fee of $400 were awarded by the nearest office of the Peruvian Ministry of Agriculture an exclusive, infinitely renewable timber concession for 2,500 acres of virgin forest adjacent to the Manu National Park. They paid about $200 per year in taxes for the rights to the timber, but in fact, they extracted no wood, but rather used their concession to keep other timber cutters, trappers, and hunters away from the area. The reason they chose that area is that my macaw research previously had identified there a clay river bank that was eaten daily by more than 100 Green-winged Macaws and 500-800 other macaws and smaller parrots of up to seven species. These men then built a small lodge and opened trails to permit tour groups to gain access to different types of virgin forest within their lands. Now, their project has a 20-bed lodge and a steady flow of tourists. As a result, thousands of poor people in southeastern Peru now look at these men, who were no different from them ten years ago, as models to be emulated. Nature conservation suddenly is on the lips of even the poorest local Indian and jungle colonist. Their project, and several other projects like it that also are spin-offs of my WCS macaw projects have captured the imagination of many of the people of the Manu region, and a surprisingly large percentage of the local population now takes nature conservation seriously. Macaw projects in Bolivia and in Brazil can have the same catalytic effect on the conservation consciousness of the local people in gigantic wild areas in Bolivia, Brazil, and anywhere else in the world where large parrots are accessible and still in sufficient numbers to provide guaranteed spectacles for visiting nature tourists.
The projects that IAS, WPT, and WCS are developing in Brazil still are in delicate stages of negotiation and planning, but every indication is that the projects there will demonstrate many of the successful elements of the Peruvian and Bolivian projects. I will describe in my talk as much of the latest Brazilian work as seems appropriate at that time, and I hope that in 1996 and beyond I will be able to share with you all the details of our ongoing work in Brazil.
One aspect of the Brazilian work funded by IAS and WPT in 1994 that I can discuss fully at this point is that of the production of palm seedlings to transplant to benefit wild Lear's Macaws. We purchased and delivered to our palm nursery in NE Brazil a full container-load of 50,000 plastic "citrapots", which are durable, inexpensive pots in which to grow and transport small palms prior to their final transplanting on co-operating ranches in the areas used by the macaws. Our first experimental germination of seeds of these crucial palms yielded an initial two thousand seedlings. In 1995 we hope to germinate between 10 and 20 thousand seedlings, but this will depend on our experimenting with different germination methods until we can settle on the most efficient technique. As this palm has never been studied systematically for commercial production, there are no existing data on the best methods for its cultivation. Therefore we are learning as we go. Nevertheless, we remain certain that it is of critical importance to forge ahead with palm germination and cultivation until we have secured a more concentrated, safe, long-term nut supply for this spectacularly aerobatic macaw.
