City Parrots

Stewart Metz, director of the Indonesian Parrot Project/PBW, send us some wonderful images of wild parrots in Jakarta. The images were made by his associates, Dudi Nandika and Dwi Agustina of the Indonesia-based (NGO) Konservasi Kakatua Indonesia.

Both organisations join in the C-A-P (Conservation-Awareness-Pride) campaign, which is directed at Indonesian schoolchildren who are markedly lacking in all three when it comes to their native parrots. One part of the Program is in “the Moluccas”; the other is in Jakarta and surrounding suburbs, since many smuggled parrots end up in the bird markets and homes in Java.

A major part of the CAP program is to take kids for their first bird-watching experience. This mostly focuses on the large population of wild Red breasted parakeets (Psittacula alexandri alexandri) in the parks around Jakarta. However, when Bonnie Zimmermann and Stewart Metz, visited the large Ragunan Zoo in Jakarta with Dudi and Dwi, they saw a number (about 7) free-ranging Goffin’s cockatoos (Cacatua goffini) which presumably had escaped from the zoo.  One pair was obviously hanging out at a nest hole.

Outside the zoo 5 Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita) were spotted together with 2 Goffin’s cockatoos and 15 Red breasted parakeets.

Stewart describes how the Goffin’s cockatoos were attempting to take over the Red breasted parakeets nest in a scene not unlike those from the popular television series “Desperate house wives”.

At another site - the “Dreamland” Park at Ancol (a tourist destination) near Jakarta more Goffin’s cockatoos were observed.

By observing the wild lives of these parrots the children of Jakarta will get a different appreciation of parrots, which they before only knew as caged birds.

The urban parrots get to play a very important role in educating the next generation of Indonesia’s schoolchildren. Allowing them to witnessing for themselves how pointless the bird trade is when smuggled birds get released in Jakarta by people that realise to late that caring for a cockatoo is something people are ill equipped to. The suffering and the horrific loss of live that these birds go trough in the live bird trade, all a dreadful mistake.