🦜 Saving the Atlantic Forest

CONSERVATION

Saving the Atlantic Forest, one parrot at a time

The Red-tailed Amazon is perhaps not among the best-named animal species in Brazil. A noisy medium-sized green parrot with purple cheeks, the red band on the bird’s tail is only rarely visible — and there’s no record of the species being found anywhere near the Amazon.

In fact, the Red-tailed Amazon is emblematic of another of Brazil’s natural biomes: the Atlantic Forest, the once-vast ecosystem that covered the country’s eastern coastline from top to bottom, and which extends inland as far as Paraguay and the Argentine province of Misiones.

The species is not only emblematic of the Atlantic Forest’s biodiversity: it also tells the story of the biome’s degradation and fragmentation. But recent conservation efforts have provided hope for the once-endangered parrot and other endemic species on Brazil’s coast.

Historically, the Atlantic Forest is one of Brazil’s most important biomes, and it is where the vast majority of the country’s population still lives today. Brazil’s colonization process began from its coast, and when the Portuguese arrived in the 1500s, virtually all they would have seen was covered in Atlantic Forest.

And as the Atlantic Forest evolved completely separate from the Amazon, it has a stunning biodiversity of its own, with a high rate of endemism. An estimated 40% of its more than 20,000 plant species can only be found in the Atlantic Forest, among the most emblematic examples being the brazilwood tree, after which the country is named. The same can be said for 30% of its 2,000+ vertebrate species — including the Red-tailed Amazon.

Historical records show the Red-tailed Amazon being found as far south as the state of Santa Catarina, but today the species is confined to around 250 kilometers of coastline between Paraná and São Paulo.

In the year 2000, the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species classified the Red-tailed Amazon as “endangered,” meaning that it was at a very high risk of extinction in the wild.

But thanks to extensive and innovative preservation efforts, the population of Red-tailed Amazons has almost doubled in the Atlantic Forest, with the IUCN bumping it up to “near threatened” status in 2017.

While urban expansion and habitat loss were the initial reasons for the decline in the Red-tailed Amazon population, in recent generations the largest threat has been illegal trade and trafficking. Coveted as pets for their plumage and ability to learn to mimic human voices, Red-tailed Amazons were routinely captured from the Paraná coast and sold for a quick buck — posing a relatively easy yet illegal source of income for local poor communities.

And in some of the harder-to-reach parts of the Atlantic Forest, parrots also served as a source of food, with beef, pork and chicken harder to come by — and oftentimes, prohibitively expensive.

In a bid to save these special birds, the Society of Wildlife Research and Environmental Education (SPVS), a conservation NGO, embarked on an ambitious project in the lush Atlantic Forest island of Ilha Rasa, part of an official environmental protection area in the middle of the Paranaguá Bay.

While the Red-tailed Amazons could be found all over the bay, it was on Ilha Rasa that they concentrated many of their favorite breeding and resting sites.

“One of our first tasks was to locate and make contact with the residents who spent more time in the forest, and who were probably involved in the capture of eggs and juvenile parrots,” explained Elenise Sipinski, wildlife project coordinator at the SPVS. “We hired these people to help us find the nests, and from then on we began monitoring the birds.”

It was at this point that Sipinski and her team noticed that not only were parrots being illegally captured from their nests, but that their nesting sites were rapidly disappearing.

“The Red-tailed Amazon nests in tree cavities, but it isn’t able to make those cavities itself, which is why it needs well-preserved forest with old trees,” she added. The parrot’s favorite trees are guanandis (Calophyllum brasiliense), which provide fruits for foraging and trunk cavities for nesting. While naturally occurring in the area, guanandi trees are far less common in more degraded parts of the forest.

The solution, said Sipinski, was to build artificial nests out of wood or PVC, and fix them to appropriate trees around the forest. The first of these were put up in 2003.

“We started out with 15 of these nests and in the first year the parrots were already nesting there. And as they looked different to normal nests, it also reduced predation, allowing the population to grow.”

The SPVS’s constant presence, meanwhile, dissuaded illegal capture, as traffickers were aware that the artificial nests were being closely monitored. The most recent population census estimated around 9,000 Red-tailed Amazons in the region — almost double the number when the project started.

But beyond facilitating nesting and reproduction, an important part of the project consisted of getting the local community onside. The trafficking of parrots served as a local industry, with residents selling birds to tourists or even exchanging eggs for household appliances.

She added that while it was a difficult task at first, the community now understands that capturing the parrots is no longer necessary. By encouraging local tourism projects, they were able to show residents that having the Red-tailed Amazons thriving is worth much more than selling them to traffickers.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Atlantic Forest is the most altered (and deforested) of Brazil’s biomes, and very little of its original vegetation remains. Percentages vary, with researchers largely agreeing that only 12.4% of mature Atlantic Forest is still standing. When looking for completely functional parts of the forest, with its full range of species intact and providing all the environmental services one would expect from the biome, that share of remaining vegetation drops to just 7%.

The Red-tailed Amazon’s favorite nesting sites on Ilha Rasa are situated in the middle of the largest unbroken expanse of Atlantic Forest still standing today.

“It stretches from the coast of Santa Catarina, along the entire coast of Paraná and inland to a part of the Serra do Mar mountain range, and into the Vale do Ribeira in São Paulo state,” explained forest engineer and SPVS collaborator Ricardo Borges. “We’re talking almost 3 million hectares of continuous Atlantic Forest.”

Since 2018, Borges, the SPVS and other NGOs have referred to this stretch of forest, mangroves and restingas as the Great Atlantic Forest Reserve, part of a preservation initiative to boost tourism and local economies, illustrating the benefits that such exuberant forest can provide when left standing.

The Great Atlantic Forest Reserve is split into 18 subregions with markedly different characteristics, showcasing the diverse vegetation and wildlife that the biome can offer when kept intact. 

The Atlantic Forest is Brazil’s most at-risk biome. While deforestation in the Amazon, Cerrado, Caatinga and Pantanal is devastating, the generational patterns of forest degradation in the Atlantic Forest mean that what is left has a high chance of dieback, which occurs when vegetation loses its ability to regenerate.

While the Amazon is made up of vast indigenous territories, federal lands and large private holdings, Brazil’s expansion and colonization have meant that ownership of the Atlantic Forest is split up into small individual properties. 

Each landowner is permitted to deforest a certain percentage of their territory, leaving the biome as a whole extremely fragmented and unable to sustain itself.

Although overall hectares of Atlantic Forest deforestation appear negligible compared to areas the size of cities being chopped down in the Amazon and Cerrado, the fact that the future of the biome is already hanging by a thread means that any instance of forest degradation can be catastrophic.

According to satellite monitoring platform MapBiomas, the Atlantic Forest was the only one of Brazil’s biomes to see a slight increase in deforestation in 2024, rising 2% in comparison to the year before.

However, researchers point out this was largely to do with the deadly floods that hit the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul last May. Had that extreme climate event not occurred, deforestation in the biome would have decreased by an estimated 20%.

QUICK CATCH-UP

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