City ParrotsUrban Scarlet Macaw & Parrot Conservation

Peterborough Evening Telegraph, UK

Britain’s most popular talking parrot, the African grey, is under threat, wildlife campaigners have warned.

According to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), numbers of the parrot are declining in the 23 countries in which it is found as a result of the trade in wild birds.

As such trading quotas will have to be reassessed for the third time at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which opens tomorrow. Read on…

by Linda P. Myers

As the mangos ripen, and because there is very little food in the remaining forests since Hurricane Ivan, wild parrots are converging on the farms – the only places they can find food. Farmers, seeing so many parrots, believe that there are still as many as before the storm, so they are shooting the parrots as they come in to feed on the mangos. Read on…

BirdLife International

A Jamaican High Court judge has ruled in favour of the Northern Jamaica Conservation Association (NJCA), Jamaica Environment Trust (JET) and four individuals in a Judicial Review case concerning the granting of an environmental permit for part of a planned 1,918-room hotel in the Island’s bird-rich Pear Tree Bottom area of Runaway Bay. Read on…

Texas A&M News

One of the most colorful birds in the world may have a less-than-colorful future. Read on…

Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation (AWWP)

The picture shows the first 7 Spix’s macaw (Cyanopsitta spixii) chicks of the 2006 breeding season at Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation (AWWP).

These seven birds represent almost 10% of the entire known world population of this species. Together with the off-spring reared in 2004 and 2005, the AWWP has now successfully bred 12 Spix’s macaws. Read on…

The Mercury, By Sara Oelofse

Preliminary results from the annual national census of the endangered Cape Parrot (Poicephalus robustus), the only parrot endemic to South Africa, are positive, suggesting more birds have been seen than in previous years.

A member of the Cape Parrot Working Group and the co-ordinator of the research, Professor Colleen Downs of the Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said that during this year’s count over the first weekend in May, some flocks of juvenile parrots were seen, which was very encouraging. Read on…

BirdLife International

A number of the world’s birds have seemingly vanished from existence, with no reliable sightings for a number of years. This article focuses on two such enigmatic inhabitants of New Caledonia in the Pacific, one of which will be the subject of renewed search efforts following funding from the 2006 British Birdwatching Fair (Saving the Endangered Parrots of the Pacific). Read on…

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation today celebrated the efforts of numerous organizations and individuals to acquire funding necessary for construction of a new Puerto Rican parrot aviary in El Yunque Caribbean National Forest. Congress authorized $1.7 million to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for the project in 2003, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation worked with numerous groups to raise an additional $700,000 for its completion. Read on…

Indonesian Parrot Project

April 7, 2006 (Pope Valley, California) On March 16, 2006, history was made on the island of Seram, in the Maluku archipelago, Eastern Indonesia, with the first-known “soft-release” of three Salmon Crested (Seram) cockatoos back to the very forest where they were trapped eighteen months previously. Read on…

Greg Borzo, Field Museum

Research bolsters case for Philippine conservation

CHICAGO — Scientists have discovered two new species — a parrot and a mouse — that live only on a small island in the Philippines. This island, Camiguin, is the smallest Philippine island, of which there are 7,000, known to support a bird or mammal species that is endemic (lives nowhere else).

The scientists’ research, which is embargoed, is described in the April 5 issue of Fieldiana: Zoology, a peer-reviewed, scientific journal about biodiversity research published by The Field Museum. Read on…