Tambopata Macaw Project
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| Formation | January 1, 1989 |
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| Location | |
| Coordinates | 13°08′04″S 69°36′38″W / 13.1345°S 69.610667°WCoordinates: 13°08′04″S 69°36′38″W / 13.1345°S 69.610667°W |
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Director
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Dr. Donald Brightsmith |
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Staff
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10 |
| Website | vetmed |
The Tambopata Macaw Project (Spanish: Proyecto Guacamayo de Tambopata) is a long term research project on the ecology and conservation of macaws and parrots in the lowlands of south-eastern Peru under the direction of Dr. Donald Brightsmith of the Schubot Exotic Bird Health Center at Texas A&M University. The project has been working with wildlife and local communities since 1989. The long term research and monitoring has provided many insights into various aspects of parrot and wildlife of south-eastern Peru. Macaws are among the most effective flagship species for ecosystem conservation in the Amazonian rainforest.
The project is headquartered in the Tambopata Research Center (TRC) of Rainforest Expeditions situated in the Tambopata National Reserve on the upper Tambopata River in the center of a large uninhabited track of primary tropical lowland forest, very near to the Bahuaja-Sonene National Park, in the Madre de Dios Region of Peru.
The area hosts a unique forest environment, with the highest concentrations of avian clay licks in the world. A range of animals comes to satisfy their need for salt along the river banks of the region. Sometimes hundreds of macaws can be seen at the Collpa Colorado clay-lick near to the research center.
The project was established by Eduardo Nycander, a Peruvian nature enthusiastic and architect, with the goal of studying the ecology and natural history of large macaws so that this information could be used to help protect these birds throughout the tropics. In 1991 and 1992 the researchers accelerated the formation of natural dead palm cavities by cutting off the crowns of 23 live Mauritia flexuosa palms in a natural monoculture of thousands of these palms in a 0.5 km2 swamp near the Tambopata Research Center (TRC), as blue-and-yellow macaws almost exclusively nest in dead mauritia palms. Decapitating these palms began the process of rotting the interior of the trunks, which eventually provides nesting sites for these macaws.
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Wikipedia