{"id":3680,"date":"2021-02-10T10:19:10","date_gmt":"2021-02-10T16:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/?p=3680"},"modified":"2024-02-28T07:24:52","modified_gmt":"2024-02-28T13:24:52","slug":"urban-parrots-of-san-salvador","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pasopacifico.org\/urban-parrots-of-san-salvador\/","title":{"rendered":"Urban Parrots of San Salvador"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Jason G. Goldman<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 Pac\u00edfico 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.<\/p>\n
They turned out to be yellow-naped amazon parrots, the same endangered species that Paso Pac\u00edfico was hard at work restoring in southern Nicaragua. When Paso Pac\u00edfico 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 Pac\u00edfico 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 \u2013 as long as there are trees with dense foliage where they can go relatively unnoticed.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n