Parrot chicks rescued from poachers in Brazil

So far this year police in Brazil have rescued almost 14,000 illegally captured wild animals.

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Watch flesh-eating beetles devour a parrot… for science

Military Macaw being devoured by flesh-eating beetles.Sometimes skin, feathers and the more fleshy parts of an animal are just in the way of the part that we need to study. So how do museums get nice clean skeletal specimens? Some museums use harsh chemicals, like hydrogen peroxide and carbon tetrachloride, to eat away the flesh — but this technique can cause damage to the bones as well as molecular changes. The Natural History Museum in London has found a greener solution: flesh-eating beetles.

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Parrot back from the brink in WA

Muir's corella has been taken off WA's endangered species list. (Credit: D. Gordon E. Robertson/Wikimedia) Muir's corella and a sun moth have been taken off WA's endangered species list, as the populations have recovered.

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Judy Tennant rescues and trains parrots and cockatoos, then finds suitable homes for them

Most of the birds Judy Tennant rescues — she currently has 15 — are the result of well-meaning owners who discover too late the enormous commitment required of having a parrot. Photograph by: Bruce DeachmanOTTAWA — Judy Tennant literally wears the trials of her profession on her sleeve. Her arms and hands are scarred by the claws and beaks of the parrots she’s rescued, and she’s twice been sent to the emergency ward of the hospital by Sinbad, a Green-winged macaw in her care that arrived with nasty aggression issues.

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Not just a pretty boy: Parrot fashions tool out of stick to retrieve nuts

Who's a clever boy: Figaro uses a twig to fetch a nutFigaro may not be as talented an inventor as Leonardo da Vinci, but among Goffin's cockatoos, he's a prodigy. In their natural habitat—the forests of Indonesia these cockatoos have never been seen making or using tools. But researchers report today—that Figaro, a member of a captive colony of the birds in Austria, invents and uses stick tools of his own design. Although toolmaking and use is not uncommon in animals, this type of spontaneous innovation and individual creativity is "exceedingly rare" among nonhuman animals, the scientists note, and opens up many questions about the cognitive skills required. Understanding these processes, they say, may help unlock many of the questions about the evolution of intelligence.

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