Protecting Cameroon’s grey orators
A forest corridor project in Africa, backed by World Land Trust, will work to safeguard the Endangered Grey Parrot, says José Rojo Martín.
Grey Parrot’s exceptional intelligence has long been the species’ blessing and its undoing; the chief driver of the relentless pet trade that has snatched millions of these birds from their home in Africa. A forest corridor project backed by World Land Trust (WLT) will work to safeguard colonies at risk in eastern Cameroon, linking them to a tomorrow where mass-scale logging and trapping have no place, says WLT’s José Rojo Martín.
The two Grey Parrots looked on expectantly as the researcher unveiled a piece of food and series of metal rings, the other side of the glass.
For weeks, both birds had been trained to pass the metal tokens back through a small hole to the scientists to earn food rewards, but that day was different. That day, the Grey Parrots had been separated from each other. One bird retained access to the metal rings but could not hand them over to the scientist; its only option was to pass them to the second bird, and watch it claim the food reward instead. This was a test of whether an animal understands – and acts on – the fact that another needs help, and almost every Grey Parrot passed it; a historic first for a bird species.
The experiment by the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich last year encapsulates just how exceptional the birds that World Land Trust
(WLT) partner Environment and Rural Development Foundation (ERuDeF) wants to protect in Africa are. This year, the conservation organisation launched a plan to protect a sweeping forest corridor between Deng Deng NP and Belabo Council Forest in east Cameroon. These two new forest reserves provide a home for three globally threatened bird species – Grey Parrot, Grey-necked Rockfowl and Bates’s Weaver – as well as Western Gorilla, Chimpanzee, pangolin, Leopard, Hippopotamus, otters and more.
With help from the WLT’s campaign A Future for Gorillas, ERuDeF has already secured the funding it needs for the game-changing forest corridor to succeed. Succeed it must for the sake of this ecosystem; a trove of endangered life beset on all sides by world events. Armed conflict in western Cameroon and the Central African Republic has forced refugees to relocate to the area, triggering a sharp rise in logging and poaching in the dense forests that form the cornerstone of Grey Parrot’s lives.
Gwendoline Angwa, the ranger managing ERuDeF’s forest corridor project, places deforestation and trapping for food and trade at the top of the list of major threats for Cameroon’s Grey Parrots. “The rainforest along the proposed corridor is highly exploited due to its richness in biological diversity,” she comments.
“To survive, the communities around reserves depend greatly on subsistence and commercial agriculture, logging and hunting,” she explains. “The clearing of the forest for farming has reduced Grey Parrot’s habitats massively. In this eastern region of Cameroon, very little attention is paid to birds like these.”
An extraordinary brain
Grey Parrot’s remarkable intelligence needs little explaining. A quick internet search will yield heaps of footage of these birds displaying a vocabulary of hundreds of words and sounds, chatting with virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and – most famously for UK
readers – having to be kept apart at zoos after telling folk ‘where to go’.
These parrots’ sophisticated cognitive and communicative skills, equated by researchers to those of a five-year-old human child, are their curse as much as their blessing. Figures compiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lay bare the devastation caused by the trade of Grey Parrots to Europe, the US, the Middle East and China, where they rank among the most popular avian pets. According to the global conservation body’s latest review, more than 1.3 million individuals caught in Africa’s forests entered the international pet trade between 1982 and 2014 alone.
Coupled with deforestation, relentless poaching has seen Grey Parrot’s conservation status take a turn for the worse across its range in Central Africa; the IUCN uplisted it to Endangered in 2018.
If the pet trade is a continent-wide scourge, it appears to have afflicted Cameroon particularly badly in recent decades: the IUCN believes the country accounted for almost 50% of all African exports from 1990-96, with many birds not surviving the drive to the airport. Cameroon has since acted to stem the flow, however: the country is currently the only one to apply an export quota (3,000 per year.)
The picture is brightening somewhat for Grey Parrots: international trade has slowed as restrictions and monitoring programmes kicked in, the IUCN found. In Cameroon, ERuDeF wants to bolster the species’ chances by tackling its other chief challenge: deforestation. With help from WLT donors this year and beyond, the corridor the Cameroonian non-profit wants to create would protect 9,588 ha of rainforests across a first (5,000 ha) and second (4,588 ha) community reserves.
“The corridor will significantly benefit Grey Parrots because largescale deforestation will give way to far more sustainable and selective forms of logging and farming and most importantly, to the promotion of alternative sources of livelihood like bee-keeping among forest-dependent communities,” ERuDeF’s Gwendoline points out, adding that – in one of nature’s many symbiotic circles – the
❝Witnessing Grey Parrots in their natural forgets environment is not a sight one easily❞
benefits will feed back to the forest itself. “These birds are great agents of seed dispersal and pollination, and have majorly contributed to the richness of the tropical ecosystem they live in.”
A safer home
Witnessing Grey Parrots in their natural environment, far away from the enclosed rooms and birdcages portrayed in YouTube clips, is not a sight one easily forgets.
Amos Fang Zeh, Biodiversity Research Officer at ERuDeF, remembers coming across a large community in the wild.
The sighting, he says, happened three years ago at the Dja Biosphere Reserve, part of the protected network managed by ERuDeF elsewhere in Cameroon. “This was a large colony. The birds were very sociable and always flew through the forest in a noisy group, all at once. They seemed to love the swampy environment,” Amos recounts today, adding that Grey Parrot’s presence was later confirmed in and around the area where the proposed corridor will be set up.
Life in the colony is a raucous, gregarious affair. The Grey Parrots perching amid the treetops are both the biggest parrot anywhere in Africa – with average body lengths of 33 cm and wingspan of 46-52 cm – but also a striking sight: a cloak of silver punctuated by a white face mask and a vivid, reddish tail. The chattering tree dwellers flock all over the canopy in search of the fruits, seeds and nuts that make up the cornerstone of their diet. Once food is found, Grey Parrot’s strong beak makes quick work as it tears open oil palm nuts, cola plant berries and others.
When the time comes to breed, a
Grey Parrot’s world shrinks from the big colony to smaller units. The search for a lifelong mate begins when birds reach three to five years of age; little is known of the ensuing courtship rituals in the wild, but researchers have so far recorded display flights around nest holes, courtship feeding from males to their mates and parrots serenading each other in soft notes. Once the pair is formed, a nest is made in pre-existing tree cavities 10 to 30 m above ground; females will incubate three to four eggs while the male stands guard.
Enlisting local communities
If Grey Parrots are to be given a chance against logging and poaching, securing the buy-in of local people is crucial
– and this has been at the crux of ERuDeF’s plan from its very inception. The clue lies in the very name of WLT partner’s conservation approach. “ERuDeF’s choice of community reserves means they won’t be purchasing forest properties,” says Mary McEvoy, Project Manager at WLT. “Instead, local people will decide through a fully participatory process which land they are setting aside for the corridor. In return, ERuDeF will help them transition to alternative livelihoods such as bee-keeping, with management plans produced together to generate sustainable, nature-friendly income from the forest itself – a winwin for people and conservation,” she adds.
Ensuring the forest corridor benefits people as well as planet is crucial if conservation is to win the day in Cameroon, a victory that would spell major implications for birds other than Grey Parrots. To save these rainforests is to save the home of Grey-necked Rockfowl, a passerine classified as Vulnerable that lights up the forest floor with its blue fore-crown, red nape and black band around the eyes. To create a forest corridor in this area of Cameroon is to safeguard the dense tropical canopy that Bates’s Weaver – an Endangered bird that is endemic to the country – needs to thrive.
Together with the Western Gorillas, Chimpanzees, elephants, Leopards and other species they share the forest with, all three globally threatened bird species stand to avoid a fate of isolation and population decline if ERuDeF’s plan comes through. As the WLT partner works to establish the corridor between Deng Deng NP and the Belabo Council Forest, a future is possible where the raucous calls of Grey Parrot colonies never stop echoing all over the jungle canopy of eastern Cameroon. ■