| | |  Editorials | Environmental 
Wildlife Trafficking - Part 3
 Charles Bergman - Smithsonian.com
go to original
January 10, 2010
Smithsonian magazine, December 2009
| | At a riverside bazaar, Bergman found an abundance of illicit goods, including turtle eggs and meat from 22 different species. (Charles Bergman) | |
"Are you going to cut this tree down?" I asked Fausto.
"It depends if there are babies or just eggs," he said.
Though the techniques for catching animals are as varied as human ingenuity, hunters often fell trees to capture chicks, which can be tamed to live with people. (Eggs are unlikely to yield chicks that live, and adults are too wild to domesticate.)
The macaw inside the nest eyed us for a time and then dropped out of sight into the cavity. The other macaw retreated to a roost above us in a tree, occasionally croaking to its mate.
Paa and Fausto spoke in Huaorani. Fausto translated: "There are no babies," he said. "They have eggs. We have to wait until the babies are bigger."
We agreed to return in several weeks, when the chicks would be near fledging.
"But don't count on the nest still being here," Fausto said. "Someone else will take these birds. I know what happens on the river."
Psittacines—the parrot family, which includes parrots, parakeets and macaws—are among the most popular animals in the pet trade, legal and illegal. And no wonder. "What more could you ask for in a pet?" said Jamie Gilardi, director of the World Parrot Trust. Parrots are some of the most spectacular creatures in the world. "They seem as smart as a human companion and are incredibly engaging and endlessly fascinating," Gilardi said. "Humans find them fun to be around, and have done so for millennia." (At the same time, he cautions that parrots are also demanding pets that live for decades.) Indeed, archaeological studies have uncovered scarlet macaw feathers and bones dating from 1,000 years ago in Native American sites in New Mexico; the birds had been transported at least 700 miles.
International laws may be helping to reduce some parrot smuggling. The estimated number of parrots taken illegally from Mexico to the United States declined from 150,000 a year in the late 1980s to perhaps 9,400 now. But the toll on parrots of all kinds remains huge. In an analysis of studies done in 14 Latin American nations, biologists found that 30 percent of parrot nests had been poached; perhaps 400,000 to 800,000 parrot chicks were taken from nests every year.
|
|
| |
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us