November 19th, 2008 by Gypsy

LA GARITA DE ALAJUELA, Costa Rica (AP) — Endangered scarlet macaws born in captivity are reproducing in the wild for the first time on Costa Rica’s southern Pacific coast. Three-week-old scarlet macaw chicks sit in an incubator at the ZooAve center in La Garita, Costa Rica.

The ZooAve Center for the Rescue of Endangered Species has released 100 of the birds into the wild in the past decade. But biologists didn’t spot offspring until last year, biologist Laura Fournier said.

Since then, they have recorded 22 chicks born in the wild, and four more scarlet macaw couples have laid eggs, Fournier said.

The parrots once occupied all of Costa Rica. But hunting and poaching dramatically cut their population, and they are now found only in two national parks along the coast.

The biologists’ goal is for 200 birds to populate an isolated coastal area.

Chicks are hatched at the ZooAve center in La Garita, northwest of Costa Rica’s capital, San Jose. At 6 months, they take a 200-mile trip to the southern city of Golfito and then travel by boat to a beach and finally the isolated San Josecito conservation center, far from human settlements. There, they spend up to three months in captivity before being released.

The parrots, which live up to 80 years, can start reproducing at age 7. Of ZooAve’s 86 scarlet macaws, 54 are in the reproduction program.

Many parrots in the breeding program were confiscated by environmental authorities or turned in by their former owners. Some can’t leave the sanctuary because they don’t know how to survive in the wild.

“Many don’t even know how to feed themselves,” Fournier said.

November 14th, 2008 by Gypsy

A Wild Quaker Parrot on Guard at a Human-Built “Monk Bunker” in Connecticut. Photo by Marc Johnson

Thanks to the input of Quaker Parrot experts from the Wildlife Orphanage and Southern Connecticut State University, wild parrots displaced by an $88,000 light replacement project in Stamford’s Cummings Park will be able to use temporary “monk bunkers” while work proceeds, according to an article in the Stamford Advocate.

While it’s always traumatic to see these nests torn down, it’s great to see these projects being conducted at a time of year when the young have had time to fledge but before the onset of cold weather.

Even those supervising the teardown work have been impressed by the quality of the monks’ construction work, as evinced by the comment of Joseph Barbarotta, who noted that the monk parakeets “must have a head engineer” to produce such impressive structures. For this reason, Monk Parakeets are widely known as the Master Architects of the Bird World.

Thanks to Wynne Parry, the author of this story, for sending it our way.

November 14th, 2008 by Gypsy

ScienceBlogs has posted an informative article on the DNA composition of the Northeast U.S.A.’s wild monk parakeets (AKA Quaker Parrots). There are four subspecies of monks which range across South America. Only one subspecies (called monachus01), which hale originally from Argentina and Uraguay, dominate in the Northeast, although a distinct subspecies (monachus02) has been sampled in Edgewater, New Jersey.This suggests that the original birds whose descendants live throughout the Northeast were supplied by a limited set of exotic bird traffickers. For more on the origin of these remarkable creatures, read What Are Wild Parrots Doing in Brooklyn?