Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Plan to stop parrot poachers
Wildlife traders have captured 2 million African Grey parrots since 1975, writes CHARLES BERGMAN
ON PRESIDENT Barack Obama’s trip to Africa this year, he made history with a major speech on wildlife trafficking. Illegal trade is one of the top threats to wildlife worldwide, and it is on the rise globally. The presidential spotlight on the issue is invaluable.
As Obama was making his speech in Tanzania, I was also in Africa, working on a historic project in the fight against trafficking.
With Jane Goodall, I was part of a four-person team from the World Parrot Trust.
We were in Uganda to release a group of African Grey parrots that had been confiscated as they were being smuggled into Bulgaria.
It was the first time that parrots smuggled out of Africa were returned to the continent and released back into the wild.
“It’s a story of how bad the trade has become,” Goodall said over dinner the night before the release. “And it’s a story of hope.” African Grey parrots are among the most heavily traded of all animals.
Their popularity is fuelled by recent research on their astonishing intelligence.
In some ways, their cognitive abilities rival those of a three-yearold child.
Alex, the “genius” African Grey parrot studied by Irene Pepperberg, had a vocabulary of more than 100 words and a sassy tongue – a real smart Alec.
In fact, parrots may be the smartest birds in the world.
According to Rowan Martin, the energetic ornithologist who managed our release of the parrots, about two million African Grey parrots have been captured from the wild for the global pet trade since 1975. This figure is staggering. Most of the parrots were captured as part of a thriving legal trade in wild-caught parrots.
It seems counterintuitive: Obama and many conservationists focus on the illegal trade, with its shadow world of poachers and smugglers, but the real problem may be the legal trade itself.
On July 10, Goodall and Martin pulled on a long rope, and a window slowly jerked open on the makeshift aviary where the confiscated parrots were housed.
The parrots didn’t rush to freedom as you might expect. Instead, they hunkered in the corner of their aviary.
Unassuming gray birds with fiery crimson tails, these parrots have clear yellow eyes and the stare of fully conscious beings.
They eyed us from afar with evident distrust and suspicion. It was understandable. They had been through hell.
It had been three and a half years since they were captured, probably in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
They were smuggled out of Africa into Lebanon, given fake papers, and shipped to Bulgaria.
A sharp-eyed customs official seized the shipment of 108 parrots when he noticed a problem with the papers.
Most of the birds were in bad shape. Several died shortly after arrival at Bulgaria’s Sofia Zoo.
It took the World Parrot Trust another three years to find a suitable place to release the parrots, to navigate the international bureaucracy, and to rehabilitate the birds sufficiently for release.
Uganda agreed to the release on Ngamba Island, in Lake Victoria.
The island is a forested sanctuary for orphaned and rescued chimpanzees, an ideal place to safely release the parrots.
African Grey parrots can live as long as 40 to 50 years with good care in captivity, and perhaps 20 to 25 in the wild.
But just 17 out of the 108 confiscated birds were still alive – sad testimony to the trauma and suffering that the trade inflicts on its creatures.
The released parrots reveal the strange entanglements of the legal and illegal trade.
The legal trade often serves as a cover for traffickers – just as these parrots had been “laundered” in Lebanon – and many argue that it supports trafficking.
In a system where monitoring and enforcement are feeble to nonex-
higher
levels
of istent, traffickers exploit a simple fact: It’s very difficult to tell a legal parrot from an illegal parrot.
“There’s no doubt,” said James Gilardi, president of the World Parrot Trust, “the legal trade promotes, encourages, and provides cover for the illegal trade”. The brief against the legal trade goes deeper, to the heart of the system itself.
Martin put it this way: “People think as long as there is a legal trade – that it’s being managed and supervised.
“If it weren’t sustainable, they would not allow the trade.”
They took off in small groups, using wings that had not flown in years. It’s hard to argue that the legal trade in African Grey parrots has been well-managed.
According to BirdLife International, 21 percent of the wild Africa Grey parrot population has been harvested annually during some periods.
The legal trade has a 40 to 60 percent mortality rate between capture and export.
The result is predictable – the African Grey parrot has suffered dramatic declines.
It is absent in many places and rare in others.
The illegal trade provides a narrative that lays the blame on poachers, often poor people in struggling developing countries.
Or on the dark romance of smuggling.
A narrative that examines the legal trade requires a shift in thinking and brings the issue home.
Protecting valued wildlife is a policy issue, one with global implications – and we all can influence policy.
The global trade in parrots and other wildlife is managed by the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species, which sets quotas for legally traded species.
According to the World Parrot Trust, Cites will consider a proposal to end the legal trade in African Grey parrots at its next meeting, scheduled for 2016 in South Africa.
Meanwhile, at the aviary on Ngamba Island, it was deeply moving to watch those first flights of freedom knowing all the trauma and stress the parrots had endured. – Slate