Rio cockatoo spanish series#

“To start, the first captive population (the one in El Yunque) was founded by vocally naive parrots.” “The reasons why this happened vary between populations”, Ms Martínez said in email. Careful analysis revealed that the El Yunque captive, the Río Abajo captive and the Río Abajo free-flying populations all shared at least two call variants, but even still, each population’s contact calls were nevertheless distinctive. This contrasts with the contact calls produced by the other flocks of parrots, which are comprised of least two different syllables. It was almost as if the last truly wild flock was speaking a different language entirely. Further, she found that contact calls produced by the relict flock at El Yunque were radically different from contact calls produced by all the other populations, and was described as a single repeated syllable, confirming anecdotal reports. As Ms Martínez suspected, each of the four populations had its own discrete dialect. The spectrograms were then grouped based on their similarities to determine whether they could be accurately assigned to their source populations based on their acoustic structure.

Rio cockatoo spanish series#

The numbers in (D) represent the three sections of the chi syllable: 1 = descending harmonic series 2 = jump to higher frequency 3 = descending harmonic series. and C) and repeated secondary syllables caw (B) and chi (D). “If you would go into the El Yunque forest to work with the wild population, it almost sounded like a different species”, Ms Martínez pointed out in email.į I G U R E 2 Examples of caw and chi contact calls with expanded view of introductory syllables (A. In fact, Ms Martínez soon found that all three captive-bred populations, which sounded different from each other, all sounded dramatically different from the last remaining truly wild flock, too. “At this point, I had not yet visited the wild parrots in El Yunque but many of my co-workers had, and they always remarked on how different the wild birds in El Yunque sounded in comparison to all the other populations.” “I noticed that I could usually tell if a wild or a captive bird was calling even if I couldn’t see it”, Ms Martínez said. It was 2013, and she was deciding on a topic for her MS project at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, when she first became aware of the acoustic differences between the wild and captive birds in the Río Abajo Forest. “I would say I first noticed about a year after I had been working with the parrots”, Ms Martínez said in email. Shortly after she started working with the iguaca, Ms Martínez noticed something strange about the different parrot flocks: they all spoke different languages. Black lines indicate the geographical locations of the four study populations: Rio Abajo captive (RAC), Rio Abajo wild (RAW), El Yunque captive (EYC) and El Yunque wild (EYW). But they didn’t successfully breed their first chick in captivity until 1979.”ĭespite this slow start, by 2006, there were 600 iguaca in four separate populations: a captive flock and a free-roaming reintroduced flock in Río Abajo State Forest, a captive flock established in 1973 in El Yunque National Forest, and the last members of the original wild flock that were confined to one of the island’s few remaining rainforests, El Yunque.į I G U R E 1 Map of Puerto Rico showing boundaries of the El Yunque National Forest and Rio Abajo.

“At this point, they began bringing birds into captivity mostly by removing eggs and chicks from the few remaining wild nests. “The captive-breeding program began in 1973”, said conservation biologist Tanya Martínez, Project Leader for the Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Project that is run by the Puerto Rico Department of Natural and Environmental Resources, in email. (Credit: Tanya Martínez, Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Project) Tanya Martínez / Puerto Rican Parrot Recovery Project extinct by human persecution but is being recovered by captive-breeding and habitat protections. Portrait of a Puerto Rican parrot, or Iguaca (Amazona vittata).