City’s wild parrots color up the Richmond

Djuna Mauceri holds Cookie, a green-cheeked conure exotic bird, as Terri Jones, director of Arcadia Bird Sanctuary, assists her at Manhattan's Bryant Park on Aug. 21. (Benjamin Chasteen)NEW YORK—J.B., a small Senegal parrot, had her first outing to Bryant Park Tuesday with the Arcadia Bird Sanctuary. Her initials stand for “Just Bird,” for lack of a better name, said Terri Jones, director of the sanctuary.
The Puerto Rican parrot, Amazona vittata, was once abundant in Puerto RicoFederal and local agencies are sticking solidly behind a program to boost the population of endangered Puerto Rican parrots.
The Puerto Rican parrot, Amazona vittata, was once abundant in Puerto Rico, including the islands of Culebra, Vieques and Mona. This parrot is now one of the most endangered birds in the world and the last species of psittacine extant and native to the United States.
In pre-colonial times, there were an estimated 1 million of the birds spread across Puerto Rico. Intensive agriculture, particularly the massive clearing of forests for sugar cane, coffee and citrus, and a series of devastating hurricanes destroyed most of their prime habitat. By the late 1960s, they had disappeared from the entire island, except a few dozen in El Yunque, a mountainous tropical rain forest east of San Juan. In 1975, a census found just 13 birds left in the wild.
Thick-billed Parrot, an endangered species that was extirpated from the United States in the 1930sThe Society for Conservation Biology (SCB) submitted formal comments today to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) on the draft recovery plan for the Thick-billed Parrot, an endangered species that was extirpated from the United States in the 1930s. The Thick-billed Parrot is now only found in Mexico and continues to decline there, mostly due to the loss of old growth forests in the mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental.
The Endangered Species Act requires the FWS to develop and implement recovery plans for the conservation and survival of endangered species. Each recovery plan is required to include site-specific management actions, objective and measurable criteria to determine when a species is no longer threatened, and estimates of the time and costs to carry out conservation measures to recover the species. While the recovery plan for the Thick-billed Parrot contains detailed information about conservation efforts in Mexico, criteria for recovery within the United States are insufficient and lacking in detail.