EnglishBy Jason G. Goldman
The world lurched to a standstill in the spring of 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic infiltrated nearly every corner of the planet. But while our daily lives slowed and changed, the rest of the natural world kept plodding on, almost oblivious to the fear and angst gripping human communities. Spending all that time at home, many people began looking out their windows or going on long walks in their neighborhoods and noticing, some for the very first time, the plants and animals that have quietly found a way to survive alongside us in big cities.
Perhaps that explains why a gentleman living in San Salvador began photographing the birds flying by his ninth-story condominium. Because of its work elsewhere in El Salvador, Paso Pacífico has been featured in local news quite a bit, so the man thought to reach out to the organization about the birds he had been watching.
They turned out to be yellow-naped amazon parrots, the same endangered species that Paso Pacífico was hard at work restoring in southern Nicaragua. When Paso Pacífico biologists began looking, they counted more than eighty parrots, including two roosts of at least thirty birds each. In order to protect the birds, which can fetch high prices on the black market for the pet trade, Paso Pacífico is not revealing the roosts’ specific locations. Still, their behavior suggests that these birds do not hesitate gathering in busy, crowded areas, near heavily trafficked roads – as long as there are trees with dense foliage where they can go relatively unnoticed.
The researchers suspect that the reason the parrots have gone undetected until now is because they remain active at night, when people are indoors and asleep. By the time the sun rises, most of the birds have moved on to other spots in the city, with only a few stragglers left at the roost sites.
It’s not actually all that surprising that the species has found a way to persist in the big city. Several years ago, a team of Mexican and American researchers observed yellow-naped amazons at two different sites in Costa Rica. They found that the parrots were equally able to thrive in ranchland, where natural vegetation is more widely distributed, as on farmland, where the little remaining natural areas are more densely clustered in small habitat patches.
Despite being members of the same species, the two groups of parrots – separated by just thirty kilometers – employed different strategies for establishing territories, selecting suitable habitats, and roosting. Even more impressive was what happened when the researchers translocated parrots between the two sites. Despite having been raised on ranchland, the parrots released on farmland quickly took on the survival strategies of those who had always lived there. That was also true for those parrots captured on the farm and released later in the ranching area.
In other words, yellow-naped amazons turn out to be remarkably malleable, able to rapidly adjust to a wide variety of different conditions – including, as the birds of San Salvador have shown, to heavily urbanized areas.
The birds’ numbers may be dwindling throughout their range, but they have apparently found a way to survive in some of the most intensely disturbed habitats in El Salvador. Indeed, these urban flocks might well comprise the largest population of yellow-naped amazons in the whole country. “The hope for the yellow-naped amazon parrot in El Salvador comes from the city,” says Paso Pacífico executive director Dr. Sarah Otterstrom.
