The Puerto Rican parrot was one of the first species to be listed under the Endangered Species Act more than thirty years ago. It remains one of the most critically endangered members of the list today; fewer than forty individuals remain in the wild. Photo credits, left to right: © Parrots International; © Mark Lesh, A-Frame Maps and Illustration; © A. Lee Bennett Jr., www.atpm.com
Five hundred and twelve years ago, on his second voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus dropped anchor off the Caribbean island that he named San Juan de Bautista. He and his crew of Spanish explorers saw white-sand beaches bordered by lushly forested mountains. They were greeted by the native Taino people, who gave them gifts of gold nuggets plucked from the island’s rivers. Hundreds of noisy, bright-green parrots with beautiful white-ringed eyes swooped overhead. The Taino called these birds “Higuaca.” At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Spanish colonists estimated that there were nearly a million of these beautiful birds living in the island’s forests.
Today there are fewer than forty Amazona vittata—the Puerto Rican parrot—living in the wild on the island we know as Puerto Rico. The 28,000-acre Caribbean National Forest, also known as El Yunque, is the sole remaining habitat where the parrots can find trees with cavities suitable for nesting and seeds and fruits to eat. Their demise is directly related to the rise of human population on the island: As colonists cut down forests and converted land for agriculture, the habitat on which the species depended started to disappear. The remaining parrot population, which had retreated to the Luquillo Mountains, was further reduced when the forests there were cut for charcoal production in the 1900s. Of the three parrot species that inhabited U.S. territory at the turn of the twentieth century, all but the Puerto Rican parrot had become extinct by the 1940s.
In 1968, when the wild Puerto Rican parrot population had dwindled to around two dozen birds, a formal effort to save the species began. A concerned group of scientists and managers met at the Institute of Tropical Forestry in Puerto Rico to address the problem; this meeting signaled the start of a last-ditch recovery effort to save this extraordinary bird from extinction. What started as a gamble with no guarantee of success in 1968 became a master plan of scientific intervention, agency cooperation and management strategy by the early 1970s.
Called the Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Plan, it involved scientists and managers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the Puerto Rico Department of Natural and Environmental Resources, with added support from the World Wildlife Fund.
Photos © A. Lee Bennett Jr., www.atpm.com
By 1989, the Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Plan had been in operation for almost two decades and the parrot population in the wild had increased to forty-seven birds. Then disaster struck. On September 18th, 1989, Hurricane Hugo roared across the Luquillo Mountains, destroying more than half of the parrots in the wild. By year’s end, only twenty-two birds remained. By early 1994, the wild population had risen to thirty-nine birds and six breeding pairs. Today’s parrot population continues to hover at that level.
Much of the interagency effort is devoted to researching and managing nesting sites and controlling parrot predators in the wild. During nesting season, a team of biologists and technicians trek through the forest, where they will spend hundreds of hours monitoring the birds’ progress using cameras, microphones and binoculars. The nesting cavities are equipped with miniature battery-powered video cameras and microphones hidden in the nests and connected to a nearby blind. If a parrot fledgling falls from its nest cavity, one of the scientists can return it to its nest. Last season there were five active nests in the wild. These nests produced fourteen eggs, of which eleven hatched. Due to predation and other causes, only four young chicks survived to fly with their parents in the wild.
In addition to monitoring in the wild, the Fish and Wildlife Service operates a parrot aviary at a World War II–era army camp in the Caribbean National Forest, where captive adult parrots are studied and cared for. Breeding pairs are kept in nesting cages where they mate and where eggs are hatched. Fledglings that show promise are transferred to a much larger “flight cage” where human interaction is restricted. There, the young parrots learn how to survive in a close approximation of their future environment before being released into the wild.
Earlier this year, ground was broken for construction of a new aviary to replace the obsolete and dilapidated buildings now in use. It is being built in a more compatible section of the forest, closer to the wild population. This program, combined with Forest Service efforts to improve and maintain nesting cavities, build blinds and set up new nests, should help to guarantee the recovery of the Puerto Rican parrot in the wild.