A. lilacina VI

The search for the lilacine Amazone is finished. now i´m going via Quito back South to Buenaventura to work another month with the Tapaculo. Here a picture of the Lilacine Amazone (Amazona lilacina).

A. lilacina V

Getting to the mangroves by land sometimes makes you wish you had a danger surcharge

Rather sit back and cruise the channels with Don Victor from the Ministerio Ambiente in Muisne and his nephews

A. lilacina IV

With Octavio Fagro from the Ministerio de Medio Ambiente in Pedernales and a confiscated Amazone, whereas this one is salvini and not lilacine, the species I'm looking for

A.lilacina III

I love my job

A. lilacina II

A lot going on there. In some mangrove-leftover everythings concentrated now what had more space before

and the pools for the camarones/ shrimps/ crevetten can be so beautiful, hehe

Amazona lilacina

For all those who haven't heard it yet: I'm searching another bird that's critically endangered do get extinct. Seems to get my profession. This time, it's the Lilacine Amazone (Amazona lilacina). The population is estimated to be around 500-600 animals. But nobody really knows where this estimates come from because apart from one population next to Guayaquil little is known about in which places the parrots occur and how many of them really are in those places. What's is kind of handy is, that the amazones rely on the mangroves because they sleep in them over night. And mangroves are known to be at the ocean. Therefore I search the whole coast north of Manta and check every little mangroveswamp that's left. And I'm able to search the whole time for surfspots aswell, hehe.

so always start in the middle of the night in the mornings, here with Alfredo....
 

...and in the evenings be there for sunset aswell

Birds on sticks

We had the priviledge through our contact with Cesar Garzon to be able to have a look through the collection of the Museo Ecuadoriano de Ciencias Naturales (MECN).

Thats the way the drawers look over there: dissected and labeled birds on wooden sticks

the collection of endangered species

Three from the colección especial: on the left different species of Tapaculo, in the middle the Jocotoco, the heraldic animal of the der Fundación, who owns the Buenaventura-Reserve and on the right the Perico de Orcés, the parakeet of my thesis

Similar to this one, the Tapaculo is supposed to look like that I am searching with Claudia in Buenaventura until the end of january

The Lilacine Amazone (in the moment getting leveled up to species-status) that I'm going to be searching for three month in Manabi und Esmeraldas afterwards

Hannes (thesis with the Perico de Orcés), Claudia (my Tapaculo-boss), Cesar Garzon from the MECN and the other guy there from the Tapaculo-Project