Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers. Regina Barber here with producer Rachel Carlson. Hey, Rachel. Hey, Gina. Okay, welcome again to the show. I love reporting with you. I love being here. And this time it's really exciting because we've been reporting a story together on thick-billed parrots. And you got to see these parrots in, like, real life. Yeah, I got to go to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in Escondido, California. And I was like, oh, my God.

I drove down from Los Angeles, pulled onto a dirt road, and met some parrots at the Bird Conservation Center. It looks like they're cuddling. They're kind of looking at me. And I met their care specialist, too. It sounds like they're laughing.

Maybe they're laughing at me. Rachel, they're laughing with you. I don't know. I kind of feel like they were laughing at me. But they're still so charismatic and they look really cool too. They're bright green with little red splotches on their heads near their beaks. They have...

big pupils and the adults have black beaks while the babies have white beaks. They all live really high up in trees, usually pine, making their homes in abandoned nests and holes. Yeah, and historically you could see them from the southwest United States all the way south into Venezuela and in particular in Mexico's Sierra Madre Mountains, where you might still hear them up high in the old growth forests. So it's very green and it's

The times of the year that I've been there have been in the late summer, early fall. So sometimes you'll see a little orange and red, but it's mostly a sea of green. And some of these mountains are very steep.

and you'll see a lot of rocky outcroppings. That's Nadine Lamberski. She's the chief conservation and wildlife health officer for San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. And when I visited, she told me that these birds live really high up in cavities and trees, maybe somewhere like 6,000 to 8,000 feet up, where it gets really cold at night. I've spent many nights sleeping in that forest, and it's

It's cold. So they need a really big tree in order to have that dense wood to protect the chicks. Obviously, the chicks...

don't have any feathers when they first hatch, and they're very, very susceptible to cold. A century ago, some residents say those forests were filled with nesting parrots. But over the decades, their habitat has shrunk, and their population has plummeted, which is why in 1970, they were listed as endangered. Still, their populations continued to decline into the 1990s when researchers estimate they numbered just over 1,000. Today,

Today, there's no longer a wild population in the U.S. You can only find them in Mexico's Sierra Madre. But in Monterey, a town in the Sierra Madre, there's a conservation group called OVIS, or Organización Vida Silvestre, Wildlife Organization, that partners with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

Ernesto Ankerlin-Hufflach is the director of science there. I'm known by some people as the Mexican parrot man. Love the name. Yeah, protecting the thick-billed parrots is kind of the latest step in what's been a longtime interest in conservation that Ernesto inherited from his father. One day he told me that he really wanted to be a conservationist, but at that time in Mexico nobody even knew what conservation was.

So I sort of said, well, I'll do what my father couldn't do. I'll do it myself. On top of the generational change he's making to be a conservationist, Ernesto is also innovating by involving the local community. For almost 30 years, he and his collaborators have been helping to save thick-billed parrots. And it might be working. The thick-billed parrot population is growing. It's increased by 10 percent in roughly the last decade.

So today on the show, the community that came together to help the thick-billed parrot. And how these birds are fighting for survival and winning, for now, thanks in part to some tiny solar-powered backpacks. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

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Okay, Rachel, so earlier we talked about how the thick-billed parrots were really struggling. Like, in the 1990s, scientists think the population could have been at its lowest. And that's the same time period when these researchers at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and OVIS started doing a census of these birds every couple years to keep track of how they were doing. Yeah, and Gina, we learned that these conservation efforts have to be multifaceted because the parrots are facing a bunch of different threats, like forest fires, firefights.

parrot smuggling and deforestation. And those pine trees the parrots use to build homes way up high in the Sierra Madre, those trees are prime targets for logging. Over time, almost 90% of those old-growth forests, those trees are removed by illegal logging activities. And at the same time they're keeping an eye on the parrot population, these researchers are also working to help the people who make a living from the forest —

Remember, logging is historically the largest threat to these parents. When we talk about protecting the forest, we also want to protect the local communities that live in that forest and benefit from it.

from that forest. And benefiting from that forest means sustainable logging practices. Over the years, researchers at OVIS, where Ernesto works, and other conservation organizations like the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance have partnered with the community to develop more sustainable forest management.

They've discussed which trees to take, how many, from where, things like that, all to minimize the impact to these endangered parrots through legal protection. And so those are the areas we're aiming for, for protecting and for not logging. And we communicate that information to government agencies that can then work on getting those formal protections for those regions. Yeah, and this is the first facet of their approach.

identifying and protecting forests in partnership with both the government and the local community. And this work has come a long way. Ernesto says that at the beginning, decades ago, he approached the issue pretty differently from locals. We were negotiating that with the community, and they depended on the forest, and here we were telling them not to use the forest. So we were stuck. And they probably would have stayed that way, except... A lady raised her hand and said...

We have to do this not for ourselves, but for our children. And so the whole negotiation turned around and we finally signed the deal. Later, Ernesto found that woman's daughter. She'd been a kid when the first deal was signed. And almost three decades later, she was now a leader of the Ajito, the local communal lands, and was in charge of renewing the contract to protect the forest. And she says, I know who you are. My mother told me about you.

and we're going to renew this contract for another 15 years. So it was amazing. To me, it was just like going around in a very beautiful way.

Even with these efforts, finding a tree to build a nest is still difficult for the thick-billed parrot. So researchers and community members came up with a second facet to their conservation efforts. Wooden nesting boxes in the forest. Nadine says these artificial nests, or bird boxes, can help these breeding couples that almost all mate for life. Aww. Yeah.

You can essentially double the number of nests in an area by providing those cavities that have the right amount of insulation so the chicks can survive. Nadine told me they have trained climbers go up the trees and then use a rope and pulley system to bring these boxes up high. You pull the nest box up there and then suspend it in the harness. Then they have to attach it to the tree. So it's...

It's quite a job. But these birds are also figuring out how to thrive on their own. Ernesto says the parrots are also learning how to use different trees to nest and different food to eat. He called it plasticity. So if they don't have pine trees, maybe they'll move to aspen trees and use smaller pine cones from younger trees. We are starting to see that maybe some of this is what we call adaptive. And that means that the gene pool is

is now favoring the parrots that have the ability to use these new types of landscape arrangements and

this new place that they live in, which has nothing to do with what it was 100 years ago. Scientists think this is another reason why the thick-billed parrot numbers are increasing. Which takes us back to our big point here: the birds are having babies and they're doing okay. And the researchers know this, in part, because they're tracking the birds with these tiny solar-powered backpacks. I love this part. The traditional method for tracking parrots has been to use a kind of a big bulky brass collar.

James Shepherd is the lead researcher behind this effort. He's a senior scientist at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, and he's been in the field putting the backpack trackers on the birds. And it's been a big help in their counting efforts.

But people weren't really sold on this idea at first. We got pushback from our partners at Overs who said, you know, there's no way you'll keep a transmitter on a bird. They'll just rip it off. They've basically got a can opener for a face. They'll just pluck anything that you put on them. I mean, a can opener for a face is pretty metal, but James wanted to try this idea anyway. So he came up with a plan to make these tiny tracking backpacks...

literally backpacks, they have little straps and everything, but they don't bother the parrots and they're even designed to fall off after a couple years. So it's very, very small, very, very lightweight. So obviously animal welfare and care is paramount with any kind of work that we do. We make sure that any kind of transmitter is less than about 4% of the animal's body weight. And these backpacks are powered by the sun. The solar panel is fantastic because it enables us to collect data across seasons.

And we know it doesn't impact the birds' survival or their flight or their breeding abilities because we've tracked birds, complete their migrations, come back up to the nesting sites, have chicks, and then head south again. And with this data, the researchers have been able to document the migration patterns and the nesting habits of these parrots, which in turn help them keep track of the parrot's recovery. And that gradual recovery makes Ernesto pretty confident they'll keep getting funding to continue this work through the end of the decade.

And Ernesto's cautiously optimistic for another reason. As he's continued to work on saving these parrots, he says he's seen people's views on conservation change. We're seeing in Mexico that many people in the cities now realize, even if they will never go to see the parrots, that if there's...

This summer, the thick-billed parrot was accepted as an Association of Zoos and Aquariums Safe Species.

And that's a program that creates recovery plans, facilitates collaborations, and even helps with funding. Fingers crossed we get some good news about these parrots in the future. Gina, I loved doing this story with you. Thanks for having me. Oh, I loved having you here. Thank you so much.

This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kweisi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. I'm Rachel Carlson. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.

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