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When we ran our Parrot Month in January, one of my most pleasant surprises was discovering how willing some experts in the ‘parrot-field’ were to provide us with information, allowing us to reproduce their articles, photographs and data etc. Leading conservationists like Jamie Gilardi of the World Parrot Trust and Stewart Metz of the Indonesian [...]

In January this year 10,000 Birds featured parrots and the threats they face (both in the wild because of eg habitat loss and as a substantial component of the illegal wild bird trade) in our first-ever ‘theme’ - “Parrot Month“. One month was hardly enough to cover every species and every aspect of parrot conservation [...]

When we organised our Parrot Month’ theme in January one of the people who was really supportive of our (somewhat naive and unformed) efforts right from the outset was Monica Engebretson, Senior Progamme Associate for Born Free USA united with Animal Protection Insitute. Monica was actually a more inspirational muse than she may have realised. [...]

In January 10,000 Birds held a ‘Parrot Month’ theme (http://10000birds.com/tag/parrot-month), and I’m ashamed to admit one of the posts I didn’t get around to formatting - not because it wasn’t any good but because it was so long - was written by Nick Sly, erudite and learned author of the Biological Ramblings blog, who has [...]

I can vividly remember when I was living in south-east England in the late 1960s/early 1970s (and still at school) sometimes catching a glimpse of small groups of long-tailed, squawking birds tearing across the skies. I had absolutely no idea what they were. It took me some years to discover that these birds were in [...]

In mid-January, as part of of our ‘Parrot Month’ theme, Corey reviewed ‘Of Parrots and People: The Sometimes Funny, Always Fascinating, and Often Catastrophic Collision of Two Intelligent Species‘ by Mira Tweti, a book - and a name - that none of the three of us here at 10,000 Birds had come across before. [...]

One of the most rewarding elements of our recent ‘Parrot Month’ was the way that experts (both researchers and owners) came forward and offered us their support and help. One of those experts was Greg Glendell, the UK’s only full-time pet parrot behaviourial consultant who is based in Somerset. Greg has had a life-long interest [...]

Last week I wrote of my visit to an Echo Parakeet Psitticula eques research field-station in the Black River Gorges National Park in Mauritius with Lone Raffray of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation.

As I wrote at the time being granted access to this highly-restricted and historically important station - and getting close to wild Echo [...]

The first major conservation campaign I ever really got involved with was a year-long ‘worldtwitch’ I undertook in 1991. I was trying to raise funds for attempts to protect the Dominican Imperial Amazon/Parrot Amazona imperialis on behalf of what became BirdLife International. I was a little naive, there was no internet to let people know [...]

A few weeks ago I posted an article on the Echo Parakeet of Mauritius, a bright green, long-tailed psitticula that been abundant at the time of European settlement around 1598 and was still common by the mid 1800s. Just over two hundred years later, however, the entire global population was estimated to be no more [...]

Yesterday we posted an interview with Mr Tri Prayudhi, ProFauna Indonesia’s Campaign Officer. ProFauna works to protect the wildlife of Indonesia - which, of course, includes many species of large - and often very rare now - cockatoos.
While I was researching our parrot Month I came across a website called MyToos.com, which aims - [...]

The Republic of Indonesia in Southeast Asia comprises a staggering 17,508 islands, about 6,000 of which are inhabited. It is the world’s largest archipelagic state and with a population of 222 million people (according to 2006 figures) it is also the world’s fourth most populous country.
Indonesia’s size, tropical climate, and archipelagic geography, support the [...]

Over the last two days of ‘Parrot Month’ (which, sadly - from my point-of-view anyway - is drawing to a close, though we still have about a week’s worth of posts to go yet!) we’ve been running a ‘theme within a theme’ looking at the parrots of Guyana and the work done by Foster Parrots [...]

Yesterday we posted about the tremendous variety of parrots found in Guyana, northern South America, and mentioned the work of Marc Johnson and Karen Windsor of Foster Parrots Ltd, who not only run a large wildlife sanctuary in Rhode Island, but are passionate about Guyana and promoting the country’s extraordinary bio-diversity to eco-tourists.

Today we’re posting [...]

Between us we’ve been organising 10,000 Birds ‘Parrot Month’ (or ‘Parrot Month and a half’ as it increasingly looks like becoming!) for about ten weeks now, and one thing that struck me a while back is just how often the same names and the same conservation/research organisations - eg World Parrot Trust, Dr Stewart Metz, [...]

For the last two days our ‘Parrot Month’ theme has been looking at the Monk Parakeet Myiopsitta monachus (and here), a South American species that has been exported for the pet-trade in vast numbers and - through a combination of accidental escapes and deliberate releases - now has feral populations across North America. One of [...]

So far on Parrot Month we’ve been looking mainly at threatened parrots that unless you live in eg Mauritius, Puerto Rico, or Peru require rather a long trek to get to see, but by way of a change - and because we’re still waiting for some info to finish off next week’s posts which will [...]

The following piece is in two parts: the first is an op-ed I wrote discussing our ‘right’ to own birds; the second is a poignant piece written by Dr Stewart Metz of the Indonesian Parrot Project (a remarkable man whom we interviewed yesterday) and titled “A Parrot’s Bill of Rights”.
 
 
Op-ed: Do we have a right [...]

I’ve learnt many things while I’ve been organsing ‘Parrot Month’ - what a Green-rumped Parrotlet needs to breed, how to pronounce ‘Tambopata‘, what happened to the Spix’s Macaw etc etc but the one thing that’s going to stick with me the most is how dedicated and how generous with their data the researchers and conservationists [...]

As always, the “Just for Fun Avian ID Quiz” is brought to you by Jory Langner, our esteemed Avian Quizmaster.
On a personal note, this year I’m conducting a “Little Year”.  No snickering please.  I consider it a hybrid, half Big Year (seeing as many species as possible) and half small carbon footprint (local to Region [...]