PARROTS OF THE CARIBBEAN

Caribbean parrots face threats from poaching, but a reintroduction programme in Aruba is giving one group of yellow-shouldered amazons a second chance

- RYAN WAGNER

Yellow-shouldered amazons gather in pairs or small groups and roost communally in tall trees

OFF VENEZUELA'S COAST LIE THE 'ABC islands' of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, some of the driest places in the Caribbean. With unpredictable rainfall, cactus-dominated landscapes and rivers that flow only every few years, life here is shaped by scarcity.

Fishing is the primary source of income for many south Caribbean islanders. Men often leave home for months. In their place, they leave a parrot "as a kind of surrogate husband and father", says Jon Paul Rodríguez, professor of ecology at the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Investigation. "The parrots become family members."

Edeline Berg grew up with a yellow-shouldered amazon - known affectionately as a 'lora' in Aruba. "I had a lot of pride in our lora," she says. The large, handsome parrot sported a green body, vivid yellow face and its titular yellow shoulder patches. Berg’s lora, nicknamed Kota, was so adept at mimicking human speech that its call was indistinguishable from her own mother. It could even fool the family dogs, she recalls.

Almost anywhere you go across the south Caribbean and mainland Venezuela, families keep parrots. Rodríguez estimates more yellow-shouldered amazons live in homes than in the wild. Limited to coastal Venezuela and a handful of offshore islands, the species is listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN and as Endangered in Venezuela.

While Berg fondly remembers her childhood parrot, as communications manager for the Aruba Conservation Foundation, she now works to protect them in the wild. In 2022, the foundation embarked on an ambitious effort to reintroduce yellow-shouldered amazons to Aruba for the first time since they were declared extinct on the island in 1947.