Chris Biro has been taking his educational Pirate Parrot Show to fairs since 1991, educating 30,000 to 50,000 people who attend his shows each year.
“Since, I got to add the conservation component to it because I’m actually doing conservation in countries in South and Central America, that’s added a whole new dimension to the show itself,” Biro said.
When Biro isn’t educating fairgoers about parrots, he’s helping revive dwindling wild populations of parrot species with captive bred birds. Biro has ongoing projects in Honduras that involves adding three parrots to a species that has roughly 100 left in the wild.
“I’ve got a student there that has a breeding pair of Buffon’s macaw, and they were breaking the eggs, so I shipped him an incubator,” Biro said. “And now we’ve had three babies in the incubator, and that’s significant because there’s only about 100 left in the wild, and that means that’s 3% of the birds in the wild.”
Other projects have been successful, as well. Biro released six blue and gold macaws last year that were bred in the pet trade. Biro said, according to a 2011 paper, biologists have a 7% success rate with captive bred parrots surviving in the wild. After a year, Biro’s birds have met a 100 percent success rate.
Biro believes the low success rate of other attempts could be because of early parrot development and some basic psychology.
“I’m designing my entire process around what I know about how the brain works and about early childhood and all this, and it’s producing really, really good results at this point, and so that’s pretty exciting because, not only are we able to release birds that were confiscated by the government, but also we’ve taken birds from the pet trade that were bred in the pet trade and demonstrated that pet trade birds do, in fact, have conservation value,” Biro explained. “If we don’t have them in captivity, I got nothing to put back in the wild. So, if they’re gone in the wild, they’re gone.”
Biro explained that the government is expanding laws that will make it harder for him to not only do his traveling show but also hurt his conservation efforts by making more species illegal to breed in captivity.
To learn more about Chris Biro and his work in parrot conservation, visit libertywings.com.
