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THREE years ago, five thick-billed parrots were released in the wilderness
of Arizona, thousands of miles from the aviary in Jersey in the Channel
Islands where they had been hand-reared. No evolutionary echoes informed
them how to behave in this alien landscape of mountainous pine forest, which
had been unoccupied by their kind for 50 years. They failed to make contact
with a group of wild-bred thick bills, imported from Mexico and released
at the same time. Within 24 hours the experiment was deemed a failure, and
the aviary orphans were back in cages, on their way to the safety of an
American captive breeding programme.

Subsequently, the Arizona reintroduction programme has enjoyed considerable
success, mainly because the birds now being released are smuggled Mexican
birds, caught in the wild and confiscated on arrival north of the border,
and birds reared in captivity by their parents. But the experience with
the Channel Islands thick bills (Rhynchopsitta pachyrhyncha) shows how little
we know about the behaviour and psychology of parrots.

Peter Bennett, conservation coordinator for the National Federation
of Zoos in Britain, points out: ‘Reintroducing highly intelligent species
like primates or parrots is a lot more difficult than reintroducing a big
dumb animal like an oryx,’ (see ‘How to go wild’, New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, 28 October
1989). Yet since at least the 4th century BC, when the Greek court physician
Ctesias marvelled at the ability of a plum-headed parakeet to speak the
language of its former Indian master, parrots have consistently been treated
as nothing more than entertaining curiosities or valuable ‘collectables’.

Now that an estimated 77 of the world’s 330 species of parrot are in
immediate danger of extinction, biologists are attempting to coordinate
knowledge about the natural history and behaviour of this family of birds.
Last year was an important turning point: conservationists founded the World
Parrot Trust, based at Hayle in Cornwall, to initiate research into both
wild and captive birds. Shortly afterwards, the International Council for
Bird Preservation (ICBP), based in Cambridge, launched a Protect the Parrots
Campaign. This aims to improve the welfare of animals in transport and to
discourage the importation of threatened birds from the wild.

Research on parrots is vital for two reasons. First, as the Arizona
project showed, anyone trying to reintroduce endangered parrots to the wild
needs to be aware of what the birds must know if they are to survive in
their natural habitats. Similarly, captive-breeding programmes must be based
on an intimate knowledge of the birds’ behaviour. We also need to learn
more about the needs of parrots kept as pets, particularly as the ICBP’s
campaign does not attempt to discourage the practice, but rather urges people
who buy parrots as pets to choose birds bred in captivity.

Biologists who know parrots well use phrases such as ‘flying primates’
and ‘honorary primates’ to describe their intelligence and their complex
social life. But while zookeepers now routinely give their simian charges
objects to play with and explore, in order to keep their active minds occupied,
such so-called behavioural enrichment has as yet hardly entered the bird
galleries.

David Shepherdson, in charge of behavioural enrichment at London Zoo,
concedes that up to now there has been a bias towards mammals, especially
primates. Some people assume that if our closest relatives are more intelligent
than other animals, they have a greater capacity to suffer. ‘As their expressions
are similar to ours it is perhaps easier to empathise with them,’ he adds.
Recognising that the present quarters for parrots are less than ideal, the
zoo is converting its parrot house into an invertebrate gallery and running
down its parrot collection. It will try to breed parrots at Whipsnade, where
there is more space away from public view. Outside the enlightened zoological
societies, the life of a parrot in captivity can be truly bleak. Evidence
of this comes from Holland, one of Europe’s most enthusiastic avicultural
nations, where a unique rescue centre, known as Netherlandse Obvang Papegaaien
or NOP, has been set up near Eindhoven to care for former domestic pets.
The centre was founded by Tony Formegan, a disillusioned dealer in parrots
who in three years has taken in 500 birds and has a waiting list for 200
more. At present, the birds live in a disused furniture factory, but last
winter Formegan launched a campaign to raise 1 million guilders (some Pounds
sterling 300 000) for a purpose-built facility in a country park.

NOP’s veterinary adviser, Gerry Dorrestein, an avian pathologist at
the University of Utrecht, says that rescued birds show many signs of stress,
including feather plucking, nervous behaviour and aggressiveness. Self-mutilated
parrots have arrived at the centre with claws pulled out and wings 80 per
cent shorter than they should be. Research at the university suggests that
captive birds in Holland live only five years on average: their life expectancy
should be 50 years or more. Dorrestein blames a combination of poor diet
and social deprivation, with many birds left alone for days at a time in
cages smaller than their own wing span.

The best insights into the psychological abilities and needs of parrots
come from the work of Irene Pepperberg of Northwestern University in Evanston,
Illinois, who has studied the cognitive processes of one African grey parrot
(Psittacus erithacus) for some 12 years. Pepperberg suggests that far from
mimicking the English language ‘parrot fashion’, her Alex has demonstrated
an understanding of abstract concepts at a level so far only attributed
to primates.

Her first step was to teach him the English labels for 80 familiar objects.
Then, deliberately shadowing similar experiments with chimpanzees, she discovered
that Alex can categorise objects according to colour, shape or material,
and can identify quantity for collections of up to six objects. His familiarity
with the concept ‘same or different’ has enabled Pepperberg to show he can
discriminate between totally unfamiliar items on the basis of abstract categories
– recognising the relationship between a green pen and a blade of grass,
for example.

In a typical ‘transfer’ test, involving unfamiliar items, Alex might
be presented with two objects at the same time, such as a piece of white
paper with five corners and a pink woollen pompom. He would then be asked
‘What’s same?’ and ‘What’s different?’ and respond in terms of colour, shape
or material. Alex’s repertoire has since been extended to include the concept
‘none’ and he has been able to indicate the absence of a similarity or difference
between two objects.

Pepperberg maintains that Alex’s abilities are significantly ahead of
other birds. A pigeon may learn to peck a key to show that two sequentially
presented colours are the same or different, but it can rarely transfer
this ability to unfamiliar items – a task non-primate mammals also find
difficult. So the pigeon’s responses are likely to be the result of associations
between specific objects rather than an understanding of colour as a category.

As yet no one knows whether Alex will ever match the ability of language-trained
chimpanzees such as David Premack’s Sarah, who demonstrated her ability
to reason in an analogical fashion, understanding the relationship between
relationships. For example, when presented with a lock and key together,
Sarah correctly recognises ‘can opener’ as the corresponding analogue to
‘c²¹²Ô’.

‘Intellectually, I don’t know where Alex is going,’ says Pepperberg.
Emotionally, however, she regards him as equivalent to a two-and-a-half
to three-year-old child, and he spends eight hours a day in human company.
‘He is very demanding, very interactive,’ she says. People don’t realise
how much attention parrots need.

Caroline Pond, a biologist at the Open University in Milton Keynes,
agrees. She says of the African grey parrot she has lived with for 16 years:
‘She is remarkably apt. You can see her thinking as she looks for the right
word. Other times she just babbles, particularly in a crisis. She is extremely
good at soliciting and getting attention.’

This view is strongly endorsed by James Serpell of the department of
veterinary medicine at the University of Cambridge and its Companion Animal
Research Group. He says parrots should not be kept as pets unless owners
are prepared to devote as much time interacting with them as they would
with a human toddler. ‘It’s a full-time job,’ he says. Also, this ‘child’
never grows up, yet may outlive its owner and may have to be written into
his or her will so someone else will continue the care.

Without this attention, Serpell believes parrots are capable of human-like
depression, with boredom and frustration causing a bird to pluck out its
own feathers until it is denuded from the neck down. The animal may also
adopt distressing stereotyped patterns of behaviour. Parrots will suffer
unless they are kept in large aviaries with other members of their own species,
he says.

‘The bred-in-captivity factor may help a bit, but you cannot escape
from the animals’ own genetic predispositions. They are incredibly social
birds, permanently attached to another partner, and live together in large
flocks and groups,’ says Serpell. In the wild, some 90 per cent of their
time is spent in preening their partners and foraging for food: deprived
of these activities, intense boredom sets in.

Serpell’s conclusions are derived in part from his study of communication
among a flock of Loriine parrots of the genus Trichoglossus, caught in the
wild. These birds, from Indonesia, Australia and the Pacific, participate
in a complex network of cooperative ritual displays based on their strong
monogamous pair bonds. For instance, the parrots perform ‘eye-blazing’,
expanding their bright orange irides, and displays such as ‘crouch quivering’
and ‘hiss-ups’ – a cross between a hiss and a hiccup – to deter rivals,
warn of danger, or defuse aggression within the pair. Even among parrots,
Trichoglossus is unique in the diversity of its display repertoire. ‘Parrots
are like primates, very clever and manipulative. They are the flying primates,
if you like,’ Serpell concludes.

The primate analogy recurs in the centuries-old debate over ‘footedness’
in parrots. The birds eat in a prehensile way by lifting food in the beak,
raising a leg and then transferring the item to the foot. (A parrot’s foot
is yoke-shaped, with the first and fourth toes pointing backwards and the
second and third pointing forward.) Many people have speculated whether
the birds’ apparent preference for manipulating food with the left foot
is comparable to right-handedness in humans. The question is particularly
intriguing in view of the parrots’ linguistic skills: in 1865 a pioneering
neurologist, Paul Broca, proposed that both language and right-handedness
were controlled from the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain.

In a review of the evidence last year in the Canadian Journal of Psychology,
Lauren Julius Harris of Michigan State University concluded that both South
American and Australian parrots are predominantly left-footed, often to
the same degree as humans are right-handed. Like humans, parrots use their
dominant foot for tasks that require only one limb: for example, to pull
a piece of sticky tape off the beak. No one yet knows whether their foot
preference is matched by greater dexterity, as in humans. Harris compares
a parrot’s active manipulation and rotation of its food to a person skinning
an orange one-handed with the aid of their teeth, but without quite the
same delicacy of control. A parrot cannot rotate its ‘ankle’ because the
bones of its leg are fused.

But the study of captive animals cannot give a complete picture of their
behaviour. Our knowledge of the psittacines, particularly the large tropical
American species, is scanty, largely because the world’s most threatened
parrots live in some of the most inaccessible parts of the world. Charles
Munn, associate research zoologist with Wild Life Conservation International
(a division of the New York Zoological Society), has attempted to solve
the problem by sitting in a harness 40 metres above the ground in the Peruvian
rainforest for up to 10 hours a day, with a net pulled over his head to
prevent swarms of sweat bees crawling into his eyes, ears and nose. Munn
reached the treetops by means of a giant slingshot made of latex surgical
tubing which he used to project a fishing line loaded with lead weights
over a topmost branch. His observation posts afforded a view stretching
80 kilometres in all directions, enabling him and his assistants, equipped
with walkie-talkies, to monitor the movements of the birds.

Out of the world’s 16 species of macaws now alive in tropical America,
eight are in danger of extinction. Munn’s six-year study has focused on
seven of them, plus another 13 species of smaller parrots. Until recently,
most biologists assumed that parrots reproduced poorly in captivity as a
result of the disruption to the birds’ natural lifestyle. But Munn’s studies
suggest that, even in the wild, 100 pairs of large macaws might fledge as
few as 15 to 25 young a year. ‘Such a glacially slow reproductive rate indicates
that macaws cannot be harvested from the wild without depleting their populations,’
he says. Because of his research, the scarlet macaw (Ara macao) is now acknowledged
to be among the world’s most threatened birds.

The pairs he observed were at the heart of the Manu National Park, covering
20 000 square kilometres in one of the most inaccessible and least disturbed
parts of the Amazon Basin, and where the annual yield of fruit is at its
highest. Even in these ideal, unspoilt con ditions, Munn found that reproductive
rate in the wild was controlled by shortage of food and nesting sites. In
competition for nest sites, rival pairs may raid each other’s nests and
kill the young. Much of the characteristic screeching of macaws communicates
information about the location of trees, says Munn. The harvesting of parrots
by local people for food can intensify the shortage of nesting sites, because
hunters often fell trees to reach the nest and young. This can be a serious
loss as macaws often build ‘double decker’ nests a few metres apart in the
same tree, even though the fact that they are intensely territorial.

Ironically, aviculturalists say that captive macaws given plenty of
food and nesting areas may be able to reproduce 10 to 30 times as fast than
in the wild. But Munn’s discoveries suggest ways of improving the life of
parrots in captivity. For instance, captive birds are almost certainly fed
an inferior diet: Munn has found that the scarlet macaw feeds on at least
38 species of plants. He also noticed that each individual has unique black
feather lines on the side of its face, and these may prove useful: even
experts find it difficult to identify parrots, particularly because the
sexes often look alike.

Like Serpell, Munn is struck by similarities to primates in the parrots’
intelligence and the complexity of their social structure: ‘I call them
honorary primates.’ Young birds apparently stay with their parents for several
years and learn much during their development. ‘They have far larger brains
for their body size than most other birds – on a par with owls and crows
– and I believe we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg of their abilities,’
he says.

Research to be supported by the World Parrot Trust will do much to explore
these abilities, and improve their lives in captivity. Already, evidence
is strong that birds bred in captivity are easier to tame, suffer less stress
and are easier to train to speak than those taken from the wild. Researchers
will also investigate optimum cage size and height. Hung very high, parrots
appear to dominate their owners and become aggressive; those placed at a
rather low level may become cowed. In Britain, the Universities Federation
for Animal Welfare says research is urgently needed to understand the housing
needs of larger psittacines.

Another important topic is imprinting – a special sort of learning which
appears to happen during a brief ‘sensitive’ period in a young bird’s development.
It may affect the ability of hand-reared chicks to form relationships with
other members of their species. One zoologist, Terry Johnson, of the Arizona
Game and Fish department, suspects that hand-rearing prevented the thick
bills released in his state from learning to recognise members of their
species as mates.

The Jersey parrots released in Arizona had bred before, but their calls
and responses were not acceptable to the wild birds. They failed to forage
for pine seeds like the local parrots and repeatedly returned to the ground
to be fed by humans. David Jeggo, curator of birds at the Jersey Wildlife
Preservation Trust which supplied them, comments: ‘The idea was that hand-reared
birds would anchor the Mexican birds in the new location. But they just
didn’t know how to behave.’

The experience has led to new strategies in the trust’s effort to build
up the number of thick-bills. This time it wants them to behave as much
like wild birds as possible. Conservationists at the trust have created
a large flocking area in which birds can mix together and pair naturally,
instead of having a mate decided for them. Jeggo says they will also encourage
parents to rear their own chicks, although by the end of last year, the
only chick left with its parents died after three weeks.

Meanwhile, the Arizona project continues, largely funded by the Wildlife
Preservation Trust International in Philadelphia. Three small flocks have
been established. By the end of 1988, there were confirmed sightings of
young birds, easily distinguished by their pale bills. One group, based
in the Tonto Basin area of east-central Arizona, is being tracked by radio
signals emitted by a bird released from San Diego zoo; this animal joined
the wild birds after 32 years in captivity. Attempts to introduce birds
reared in captivity continue, but they are expected to die earlier than
their wild-born counterparts until zookeepers learn to duplicate breeding
conditions in the wild more accurately. Paradoxically, as reintroduction
programmes try to make birds bred in captivity as wild as possible, pet
breeding programmes may develop in the opposite direction. Pet owners may
focus on the smaller species such as budgerigars, which have been moulded
by European breeders into distinct domesticated forms over hundreds of generations.
Large parrots such as macaws are essentially wild animals, Munn points out,
however tolerant they may become of human company. He believes that no one
should be allowed to keep one over a certain size: he compares it to keeping
a wolf instead of a domestic dog.

No admirers of a bird such as the majestic hyacinth macaw (Anodorhynchus
hyacinthinus), the world’s largest and arguably most beautiful parrot, would
wish to see its descendants reduced to the avian equivalent of the miniature
poodle. As research gradually reveals more of the true psittacine nature,
bird lovers will be increasingly faced with the need to balance the value
they put on the companionship they receive against the birds’ own needs
and welfare.

* * *

MATCHMAKING FOR CAPTIVE COCKATOOS AND SCARLET MACAWS

BRITAIN is bringing together the once divided worlds of aviculture and
the zoological societies to help to save the parrots. In an initiative coordinated
by the National Federation of Zoos, the work of controlled captive breeding
to generate greater genetic diversity is being dispersed to specialised
centres.

Just four species have so far been selected for special attention: the
hyacinth macaw (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus), the scarlet macaw (Ara macao),
the palm cockatoo (Probosiger aterrimus) and the moluccan cockatoo (Cacatua
moluccensis).

The scarlet macaw was chosen partly because it has been a big target
for collectors since its recent move from appendix 2 of CITES, which allows
limited trade, to appendix 1, which bans trade. Palm cockatoos are smuggled
out of New Guinea 40 or 50 at a time on board fruit boats, reaching the
West through Singapore. The threat facing the moluccan cockatoo was recognised
only in 1988 when a research team completed a population study in Indonesia.
Until then, these birds were being imported to Britain by the hundred.

The new breeding scheme relies on stud books kept by curators, each
charged with making maximum use of the genetic resources available in captivity
for a particular species. Peter Bennett, conservation coordinator to the
federation, gives advice on the theory behind the process, based on principles
of population biology. He uses mathematical models to predict factors such
as sex ratios in future generations and the long-term viability of populations.

An important part of the curators’ job is to persuade collectors to
make their birds available for breeding. ‘A lot of these people treat their
birds like a painting. It is a highly valuable piece of real estate,’ Bennett
says. David Woolcock, of the Rare Endangered Birds Breeding Centre at Paradise
Park in Cornwall, is curator for the scarlet macaw stud book. He says: ‘We
have 230 birds listed at present but I know there are many more out there.’

A major problem is that there may be many birds in captivity, but certain
pairs are over-represented in the breeding effort. ‘If you have a steady
growth in population, there is a tendency to say it is self-sustaining,
but if they are all coming from half a dozen pairs then there is a problem
for the future. The vast majority of scarlet macaws on the stud book have
not yet bred, yet they are ageing fast. No one knows how old these birds
will breed.’

Woolcock faces a dilemma. He has 33 private breeders on his list, many
of whom continue to argue against strict import controls. ‘Sometimes when
you hear an owner has acquired, say, 20 pairs of a rare macaw, you have
to ask yourself, ‘How did he get them?’ You might know there are just not
that many in captivity, but once they are captive, we have to use them.
It puts you in the position of legitimising illegal imports.’

Another ethical problem concerns whether zoos should ‘pay’ private owners
by allowing them to keep a number of the young. Woolcock admits that many
aviculturalists have greater breeding success than zoos, and this resource
cannot be ignored. ‘No official stand has been made on these issues yet.’

The unofficial status of private breeders can be highly problematic.
Consider the case of Harry Sissen of north Yorkshire, who claims to have
bred more red-fronted macaws (Ara rubrogenys) than everyone else in Europe
put together, and who says he is the only European breeder of the caninde
macaw (Ara caninde). He owns a female Lears macaw (Anodorhynchus leari),
of which there are now believed to be only about 60 left in the world, six
of them in captivity. With his successful record of macaw breeding, Sissen
says he is one of the few people in a position to help to save the Lears
macaw from extinction and he has made contact with a South African owner
who has a male bird that could make up a breeding pair.

But Sissen says he is still awaiting consent to import the South African
bird after making an application in October 1988. ‘If my bird was at a zoo,
I could get a consent tomorrow,’ he says. Sissen’s female is 40 years old
and the South African male has been in its present ownership for 12 years,
so it is a pre-CITES bird.

Breeders such as Sissen and specialist avian collections such as Paradise
Park have taken the lead in breeding parrots for conservation, because conditions
in traditional zoos have just not worked in the past. They have overcome
non-compatibility, a serious obstacle to captive breeding, by flock ing
large numbers of birds together outside the breeding season. ‘If the birds
pair naturally, it always works better and produces better offspring,’ says
Woolcock.

The fact that males and females of most species of parrot look almost
identical was also a big problem until the recent development of sexing
by laparoscopy. In this technique, a veterinarian confirms the sex by viewing
the gonads directly via an illuminated optical fibre about the size of a
large hypodermic needle. Roger Wheater, director of Edinburgh Zoo, recalls
how before laparoscopy, six male sulphur-crested cockatoos were kept together
in the belief they were three potential breeding pairs. Two parrots of the
same sex kept together will often go through conventional courting behaviour
and give every appearance of being a mated pair.

As yet, artificial insemination, almost routinely used with birds of
prey, is not regarded as an option with parrots. One problem, says Wheater,
is that imprinting seems less permanent in psittacines; a hand-reared eagle,
for example, will remain compliant to human contact, but once a parrot has
joined a group, it is never again so easy to handle. It is also harder to
predict when a female bird is ready to lay. ‘AI is still in its infancy
and will probably always remain only as a back up to natural breeding methods,’
he concludes.

Annabelle Birchall is a freelance journalist based in Sussex.