Staging Bird Murders to Save a Species
The chatty green parrots had a front-row seat to a spine-chilling show. Tethered to a tree branch not far from their cage, another parrot, similar in appearance but of a different species, was armored in a small leather vest. As the green parrots looked on, a man approached the lone parrot with yet another bird leashed to his arm: a red-tailed hawk. The hawk lunged at the parrot in the vest, wrapping its talons around it. The parrot screamed, a sound only made when death is imminent. Satisfied, the man pulled the hawk off.
This simulated attack—don’t worry, the parrot was unscathed thanks to the vest—was a ruse, aimed at Puerto Rican parrots about to be released into the wild for the first time. A critically endangered species found nowhere else in the world, those chatty green birds had never known life outside of captivity. So they were being taught what to look out for when they headed into hawk territory.
“We wanted an experience that would instill in those birds a very real fear and recognition of a red-tailed hawk as a deadly predator,” says Tom White, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Program. In 2001, White helped spearhead this fear-based training regimen for parrots before reintroducing them into the island’s forests. The training involves several other phases before the simulated attack, including “flying” a hawk-shaped cutout over the parrots’ aviary, playing recorded hawk calls, and having a live hawk attack their cage.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/teaching-captive-birds-to-fear-their-natural-predators/545195/
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K&R
