Tweet This
The Whitley Awards, sometimes known as the “Green Oscars”, recognize international conservation excellence in biodiversity-rich, resource-poor countries
Conservation ecologist and population modeler, Jon Paul Rodríguez, was recently recognized with the prestigious Whitley Gold Award by the UK-based non-governmental organization, the Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN). This prize honors the three decades that he and his team have devoted to protecting the imperiled yellow-shouldered Amazon parrot, Amazona barbadensis, in Venezuela. The Gold Award is the WFN’s highest honor.
Jon Paul Rodríguez is a professor at the Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas (Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Investigations), or IVIC, and co-founder and President of Provita, a Venezuelan conservation NGO that was established in 1987.
“My primary role has been on population modeling to design conservation strategies and general planning and oversight,” Professor Rodríguez said in email.
Thanks to Professor Rodríguez and his team’s concerted efforts to protect and conserve the parrots on Isla Margarita since the early 1990s, their number has increased from just 650 to more than 1,700.
“Provita began working in Margarita when my Provita co-founder, Franklin Rojas-Suárez, completed his undergraduate thesis on the reproductive biology of the parrot in Macanao,” Professor Rodríguez elaborated in email. “When he graduated, we initiated the conservation project in Provita, which is still on-going.”
The Whitley Awards, which are sometimes known as the “Green Oscars”, recognize outstanding contributions by conservationists and activists spearheading practical, long-lasting conservation efforts with the support of local communities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The annual Gold Award winner is selected from previous Whitley Award winners in recognition of their continued outstanding contribution to conservation. Professor Rodríguez and his team, who won their original Whitley Award in 2003 and several more prizes since then, were bestowed with a prize of £60,000 ($78,000), which will allow them to continue -- and expand -- their critically important work. Gold winners also join the Whitley Awards Judging Panel and act as a mentor to new winners during the Awards week.
“Our winners are local environmental heroes who lead projects with passion, harnessing the best available science on which to act. Through them, we support work rooted in community involvement that is pragmatic and creates lasting impact,” WFN said on its website.
Professor Rodríguez was presented his award by Her Royal Highness, Princess Anne at the Royal Geographical Society in London. The Princess Royal, a Patron of the WFN since 1999, also visits the winners in their home countries to see their work first-hand.
“WFN is a direct funding charity that really does minimize the bits in-between,” Princess Anne said in a press release. “The funding goes straight to the winners, who have a lasting impact on global, national and political levels.”
What is Professor Rodríguez’s secret to success? He and his team of dedicated professionals worked intensively to change the local community’s perceptions of the birds, by establishing local pride in the environment, and by recruiting poachers to be “eco guardians” who maintain a constant vigil over the parrots’ active nests until the chicks fledge.
But why recruit parrot poachers to guard parrot nests?
“The dilemma we faced was that the primary poachers were young men that sold the birds to the local market,” Professor Rodríguez explained in email. “They did this as employment on Macanao is very scarce, mostly associated to small-scale commercial fishing. Poaching allowed for a quick influx of cash into their households.”
Was the idea for making parrot poachers into “eco guardians” modeled on conservation efforts in other parts of the world?
“I don’t think that we modeled the eco guardians on any specific initiative, although [we] had surely heard of other places where similar efforts had been deployed,” Professor Rodríguez explained in email. “Our goal was to turn [the poachers’] deep knowledge of parrot natural history in favor of the project, while providing [them] a more reliable, predictable source of income.”
Venezuela is one of the most biodiverse nations in the world.
“There are 1415 species of birds in the country, which puts it in seventh place worldwide in terms of bird species richness,” Professor Rodríguez said in email. “In the past, Venezuela was an international birders’ destination, but very few travel to the country at present. The national birdwatcher community, however, is very active.”
Professor Rodríguez noted that conservation is not high on the priority list of the Venezuelan government, as their focus is more on political, social and economic issues. Further, the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, is often the scene of violence between supporters of opposition leader Juan Guaido and president Nicolas Maduro’s security forces. Already, more than 3 million people have fled the country.
Another critically important act for safeguarding the yellow-shouldered Amazon parrot for Professor Rodríguez and his team was getting it recognized as the official bird of the state of Nueva Esparta, which includes Isla Margarita (Margarita Island) where the bird lives.
The yellow-shouldered Amazon parrot ranges along the Caribbean coast of Venezuela. This species was extirpated from the South American mainland and is currently only found on Isla Margarita and maybe on two other islands. Coveted as a pet by the locals and routinely stolen from their nests as chicks by poachers, the species’ already precarious situation substantially worsened after Margarita Island was converted into a duty-free zone. Predictably, thousands of tourists poured in and further damaged what little remained of the parrot’s severely limited, delicate habitat.
Yellow-shouldered parrots live in desert shrublands with low thorn bushes and trees or cacti. In the wild, they feed on fruits, seeds, and cactus flowers. They nest in a cavity in a tree or in rocky cliffs. The species’ average total clutch size is 3-4 eggs, and its hatching success on Margarita Island is amongst the highest documented for any Amazona species, suggesting that the yellow-shouldered parrot has the potential to recover its numbers quickly if given the chance (ref).
In addition to working with local communities to protect the yellow-shouldered parrot, Professor Rodríguez is a member of the Captive Breeding Specialist Group (now called Conservation Breeding Specialist Group). He also works with national red lists, which eventually led to his appointment as Chair of the National Red List Working Group between 2003 and 2009. He served as the Deputy Chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission between 2009 and 2016.
Winning the Whitley Gold Award helps raise public awareness of the important work that Professor Rodríguez and his team are engaged in, and will help spread the message that we all can make a difference to the conservation of wildlife and wild places.
“Conservation works. We know how to do it. There are many examples of that,” Professor Rodríguez said in email. “Much more money is spent on destroying nature than on conserving it. So it is not surprising that most conservation news is bad news. But we need to focus on the positive, and do more of it.”
'Green Oscar' Awarded For Venezuelan Parrot Conservation | @GrrlScientist
