More rare parrots arrived from Quatar : Blue Macaws land in Berlin! The cooperation between ACTP and AWWP hit new heights today with the arrival of 10 blue macaws in Berlin. Today's shipment from AWWP saw nine Lear's Macaws and one Spix's Macaw land in Germany direct from Qatar. The arrival of this extremely precious cargo will further strengthen the captive populations of both species at our breeding facility in Berlin and assist in the quest to save these beautiful blue macaws. This is yet another big step forward for the future of both the Spix's and the Lear's Macaw. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Cromwell Purchase and his team from AWWP in Qatar for their continued determined efforts to help save the world's rarest parrots, as well as our cooperation partner ICMBio in Brazil!
Video of Spix macaws being parent-raised : https://www.facebook.com/345292195557990/videos/1076384262448776/
And 2 videos of a Glossy black cockatoo : https://www.facebook.com/345292195557990/videos/1071483012938901/ https://www.facebook.com/345292195557990/videos/1067486720005197/
Video about the 10th Anniversary of ACTP : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oq96naasDo&feature=youtu.be
Spix macaw up-date : SPIX UPDATE: The two parent raised Spix's Macaws chicks just left the nestbox. You can see in the video, how good the parents care for them! Happy little family... These two young birds are a mile stone for the reitroduction program of this species. The parents thaught them all the important things, they need to know if they will be released to the wild one day. They also can pass this information to other young birds, which were hand raised. That makes these two young Spix's macaws special and very valuable for the program! ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Is this actually the very first time that Spix have been allowed/encouraged to rear their own young (anywhere) since all the birds were first put into this rescue-type programme?
With their own offspring, I believe so, yes. However I know that they have allowed pairs to rear illiger's chicks to assess parenting skills in the not to distant past.
Small video of the Glossy cockatoo-young at the nest : https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1146035392150329
Note from Facebook : Today we would like to show you, what we do, to give our parrots the best possible conditions at our farm. For our Glossy Black Cockatoos we went to California to harvest Casuarina Nuts. These are their favorite food source and when the nuts are ripe, the breeding season starts in Australia. We hope that feeding the nuts here, will be a good kick off for our ten potential breeding pairs for the new season. We also would like to take this opportunity to thank Marie and Mark Stafford from Parrots International for their help with the harvesting and all their amazing support.
Germany first breeding of Lear's macaw ( Facebook ) : Incredible start into the breeding season 2017 The Lear's Macaw egg we showed you a while ago has hatched on the 18th of February 2017. Only being partner of the international breeding program of the Lear's Macaw for 18 month, we are more than happy to be able to support this threatened species. Not only having the first Lear's Macaw successfully bred in Germany, no, even the genetic of the baby is something special. We managed to breed with a pair, which is highly valuable for the protection program. Before the pair was sent to ACTP, breeding attempts didn't work out. The chick is developing very well and its parents are showing breeding behavior again. Together with our other Lear's macaw pairs they give us hope for a very successful breeding season, and we hope to be able to become a valuable partner for the Lear's program, as we have become for the Spix's macaw.
more information on these last two posts would be nice! Purple-crowned lorikeets and varied lorikeets would (I'm assuming) have to be direct imports from Australia, most likely from PRIAM. I don't know anything about Naretha bluebonnets outside Australia, but maybe also imports? What are the numbers of all of these at the ACTP?
This information is from their Facebook-side and no information about numbers is given but normaly ACTP alway try to start with a larger number of birds ( at least 10 specimens per species ). The Naretha bluebonnet has been kept succesfull outside Australia and in the 1980-ties a small population was known in Europe ( see article in Australian Aviculture,, vol. 48, no. 2 pp 185-186 - the writter of this article is a nice guy ! ).
Naretha's are still kept in low numbers in Europe. They are birds with a manual and half-way the 90s most birds left were collected by some breeders who specialised in them and decided to keep them without selling. It seems there is at least one breeder in Austria with dozens of them.