will be managed. In order to reduce the expense and logistical difficulty of deploying human nest-minders some of these will be replaced with “electronic nest-minders”; modified Snark data loggers that will tell us when, and for how long, females have been away from the nest.


Campaign against illegal wildlife trade in Bolivia


In 2009 PSUK supported Asociacion Armonia, based in Santa Cruz in eastern Bolivia, to conduct a series of public presentations against the inhumane, unsanitary and uncontrolled illegal wildlife trade in Bolivia. The project goal was to educate the Bolivian public on the realities of the illegal pet trade to motivate public and institutional support towards the enforcement of existing laws against the trade of Bolivian wildlife as well as wildlife brought in from neighbouring countries such as Brazil. Presentations were to be made in Bolivia’s five main cities – the capital La Paz, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Cochabamba, Trinidad and Tarija. The illegal trade of wild birds in Bolivia has been and continues to be the main threat to many parrot species. While Bolivia has created excellent wildlife protection laws which declare clearly that no one is permitted to trade Bolivian native wildlife without government consent and an authorized


12 BIRD SCENE


management plan, the illegal trade devastates parrot species with almost no law-enforcement. This threat with expanding agricultural land and ranching areas is driving trapping into the few protected areas in Bolivia. Asociacion Armonia in its conservation work with the Red- fronted Macaw and the Armonia/ Loro Parque Fundacion Blue-throated Macaw conservation programme has been studying the extent and impact of the illegal pet trade in Bolivia. Their studies found that some 37,000 individual birds are trapped from the wild into the illegal pet trade yearly, including many large CITES protected macaws, and endemic and threatened species. One must also add the number of birds that die in the process of reaching the market- possibly another 10,000. Through these studies, they were able to take hundreds of photos of parrots in appalling conditions, suffering the blind eye of Bolivia’s law. Asociacion Armonia produced 18 panels on the illegal trade using some of these photos, demonstrating to the public the horrible situation and the threats to native wildlife. These panels were presented in 4 day periods in the five cities. The illegal trade campaign raised interest by several organisations supporting Armonia’s actions – the most important being the politically placed CITES coordinator Veronica


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