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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 [...]

When we started organising Parrot Month we wondered (a little anxiously) how it would be recieved by our fellow bloggers: month-long, organised themes might not be seen as a “blog thing” (we think it is obviously, but not everyone might agree). Turns out we needn’t have worried. We’ve been truly inspired by the generosity of [...]

So far on 10,000 Birds’ ‘Parrot Month’ we’ve published twenty or so posts and we’ve written about such beautiful (and often very rare) species as the Spix’s Macaw (extinct in the wild since 2002), the Puerto Rican Parrot, Mexico’s Thick-billed Parrot, Mauritius’s Echo Parakeet, and Venezuala’s Green-rumped Parrotlet. We’ve been given extraordinary access to photographs [...]

Almost three years ago I was fortunate enough to visit the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, which lies about 560miles/900km east of Madagascar. Just 720 sq miles/1865 km² in area (40 miles/64 km in length and 30 miles/47 km in width) this tiny island has an incredible biodiversity and before the first Europeans landed on [...]

In this article (first published as “Who’s a Naughty Parrot then?” in Veterinary Times (UK) 18th Feb 2008 and reproduced on 10,000 Birds with the author’s permission) internationally-renowned companion parrot behaviourist Greg Glendell looks at the most common behavioural problems seen in companion parrots.
Some of the apparent causes of these problems are discussed, as [...]

In November I was surfing the web looking for info or contacts for our ‘Parrot Month’ when I came across a UK-based website called Parrot-Link - which is described on its homepage as “the first UK web site dedicated to helping parrots and their owners”. Replete with conservation messages and advice not to buy wild [...]

Yesterday I posted a short link to a video clip on Reuters UK which showed the shocking and inhumane conditions which a Brazilian wildlife smuggler was subjecting wild-caught parrots as he transported them illicitly out of the country in a small fishing-boat.

How can this disgusting trade be stopped? Undoubtedly work needs to be financed on [...]

Nick Sly, a blogger who writes at the thoroughly-recommended Biological Ramblings is an ornithologist, recently graduated from Cornell and cast out into the real world where he keeps a wry eye on all things biological! In October 2008, in his first field job out of school, he helped a Cornell PhD student, Karl, with his [...]

We’ve been seeing a wonderful rise in visitor numbers to 10,000 Birds of late (for which we’re very grateful). I’m not suggesting that it’s been anything to do with the Parrot Month theme we’ve been championing so hard, but it did occur to me that a quick recap of what we’ve written about so far [...]

Of Parrots and People: The Sometimes Funny, Always Fascinating, and Often Catastrophic Collision of Two Intelligent Species, by Mira Tweti, is a wonderful source for those looking to understand the intersection of people and parrots.  The book progresses nicely from a brief overview of the current scientific understanding of the complexities of bird brains, focusing [...]

When I posted about the now extinct Carolina Parakeet yesterday I was very careful to say that it was North America’s only endemic mainland parrot. Similarly when I wrote about the Puerto Rican Parrot I was careful to say that it was the last native parrot still breeding within US borders. I had to be [...]

Many of the readers who visit 10,000 Birds are members of the developed world (more than 50% are North American according to our stats), and it’s fairly easy and comforting when we think of endangered parrots to think ‘third world’ - that supposedly ‘third world’ issues like habitat change and rapidly increasing human populations etc [...]

Have you internalized the new year yet or are you still writing ‘2008′ on your checks? Frankly, I could care less what the year is… as long as the month is January, I’m freezing! What are you doing this weekend and will you be watching birds? Comment below on the excitement you have planned!
In northern [...]

In July last year I read an online article (in the July 27th 2008 edition of the Charlotte Observer) which concerned a visit made by Karen Cheek Justice, founder of the Parrot University to the Al Wabra Wildlife Preservation in Qatar where she worked with the collection of Spix’s Macaws. I emailed Karen the day [...]

When the last Spix’s Macaw Cyanopsitta spixii disappeared from the wild in October 2000, most observers who knew anything about the species were ready to write it into history. The by now iconic blue macaw was held in captivity in small numbers, but many were illegally obtained birds poached from the last substantial population in [...]

A few days ago I wrote about the Puerto Rican Parrot Amazona vittata, an island endemic which had come perilously close to extinction through a combination of habitat destruction and hunting. Numbers of both wild and aviary birds are now slowly being built up by skilled and dedicated aviculturalists in Puerto Rico and there is [...]

As part of ‘parrot-month’ we’re supporting “National Bird Day” an initiative designed by Born Free USA united with Animal Protection Institute in coordination with the Avian Welfare Coalition to take action by drawing attention to the exploitation of other countries’ native birds by the U.S. pet industry on January 5th — National Bird Day.

The trade [...]

As Dr Jamie Gilardi, exec-director of the World Parrot Trust said in his interview with us for Parrot Month, one of the greatest threats facing parrots today is habitat destruction. Most of us probably think of the Amazon basin when we think about deforestation on a huge scale, but sadly tropical forests across the world [...]

As we mentioned in yesterday’s intro post to ‘Parrot Month’ the World Parrot Trust’s website states that almost a third of all parrot species are threatened - that’s with extinction, not noise abatement orders or their neighbours by the way! When it came to putting this theme together I relied quite heavily on the World [...]