Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back

The thick-billed parrot is the only surviving parrot species native to the United States. These brightly colored birds once roamed across the American Southwest and as far south as Venezuela — but today, the only wild population remaining lives high in the forests of Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains. For years, conservation organizations like OVIS (Organización Vida Silvestre https://www.npr.org/2024/12/30/1222276526/mexico-parrots-conservation#OrganizaciónVida Silvestre) and the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance https://sandiegozoowildlifealliance.org/ have been working on a multi-faceted conservation project to save these birds. Host Regina G. Barber https://www.npr.org/people/1082526815/regina-g-barber and producer Rachel Carlson https://www.npr.org/people/1112796909/rachel-carlson dive into the details of that project — and how tiny "bird backpacks" are helping to make it all happen. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:25Regina Barber?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:31Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Waveers. Regina Barber here with producer Rachel Carlson. Hey, Rachel.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  Hey, Gina.

• 0:37Regina Barber?

  OK, welcome again to the show. I love reporting with you.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  I love being here. And this time, it's really exciting because we've been reporting a story together on thick-billed parrots.

• 0:48Regina Barber?

  And you got to see these parrots in, like, real life.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I got to go to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in Escondido, California. 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.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  They're kind of looking at me.

• 1:06Regina Barber?

  And I met their care specialist, too.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  It sounds like they're laughing. Maybe they're laughing at me.

• 1:14Regina Barber?

  Rachel, they're laughing with you.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:40Regina Barber?

  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.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  So it's very green.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  And 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.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  That's Nadine Lambert-Ski. 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 in trees, maybe somewhere like 6,000 to 8,000 feet up where it gets really cold at night.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  I've spent many nights sleeping in that forest and 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.

• 2:50Regina Barber?

  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.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Still, their populations continued to decline into the 1990s when researchers estimate they numbered just over 1,000. Today, there's no longer a wild population in the US. You can only find them in Mexico's Sierra Madre.

• 3:18Regina Barber?

  But in Monterrey, 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 Angerlin Hoeflich is the Director of Science there.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  I'm known by some people as the Mexican Parrot Man.

• 3:37Regina Barber?

  Love the name. Yeah, protecting the thick-billed parrots is kind of the latest step in what's been a long time interest in conservation that Ernesto inherited from his father.

• 3:47Speaker 04

  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, if I'll do what my father couldn't do, I'll do it myself.

• 4:00Regina Barber?

  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.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  The thick billed parrot population is growing. It's increased by 10% 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 Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 6:01Emily Kwong?

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• 7:38Regina Barber?

  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 of years to keep track of how they were doing.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  Over time, almost 90% of those old-growth forests, those trees are removed by illegal logging activities.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  And at the same time, they're keeping an eye on the pear 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 pears.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  When we talk about protecting the forest, we also want to protect the local communities that live in that forest and benefit from that forest. And benefiting from that forest means sustainable logging practices.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Over the years, researchers at OVUS, 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 pears through legal protection.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:42Speaker 04

  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.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  And they probably would have stayed that way, except...

• 9:56Speaker 04

  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.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  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 ahito, the local communal lands, and was in charge of renewing the contract to protect the forest.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  And she says, "I know who you are. My mother told me about you, and we're gonna renew this contract for another 15 years." So it was amazing. To me, it was just like going around in a very beautiful way.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  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. Oh. Yeah.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  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.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  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 quite a job.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:46Speaker 04

  We are starting to see that maybe some of this is what we call adaptive. And that means that the gene pool 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.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  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 OK. And the researchers know this, in part, because they're tracking the birds with these tiny solar-powered backpacks. I love this part.

• 12:27Speaker 07

  The traditional method for tracking parrots has been to use a kind of a big, bulky brass collar to house the transmitter in. And I thought, well, no, that's just way too heavy for these little parrots.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:53Speaker 07

  We got pushback from our partners at Obers, 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.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  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 of years.

• 13:22Speaker 07

  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, you know, 4% of the animal's body weight.

• 13:35Regina Barber?

  And these backpacks are powered by the sun.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 13:38Speaker 07

  The solar panel is fantastic because it enables us to collect data across seasons. And we know it doesn't impact the bird's 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.

• 13:57Regina Barber?

  And with this data, the researchers have been able to document the migration patterns and the nesting habits of these parrots, which in turn helped 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.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  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 a healthy population of parrots, there's healthy forests. There's healthy forests. There's climate resilience. There's water. There's opportunities for recreation, et cetera.

• 14:44Regina Barber?

  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.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Fingers crossed we get some good news about these parrots in the future.

• 14:59Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Regina, I love doing this story with you. Thanks for having me.

• 15:02Regina Barber?

  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. Kwesi 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.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  I'm Rachel Carlson.

• 15:23Regina Barber?

  Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.