Current Projects

African Grey Parrot

For hundreds of years African Grey Parrots (Psittacus erithacus) have been taken from West Africa to be kept as pets in Europe and elsewhere. They are renowned as the best talking parrots, and in recent years the advent of air transportation has resulted in hundreds of thousands of them being trapped and exported, most of them illegally.

The numbers are so great that the World Parrot Trust became interested in studying the species in the wild with a view to assessing the likelihood of them becoming extinct in the wild. This must be a dread possibility, bearing in mind the vast numbers of the Passenger Pigeon and the Carolina Parakeet, both of which went extinct in the USA in a few short years.

WPT supported an expedition to the Central African Republic by Diana May of the University of Arizona. This resulted in some of the first sound scientific information about the Grey Parrot and its ecology; this has been published in PsittaScene, and a new WPT video about this species in captivity and in the wild is available.

In 2002 we also funded work by Dr. Usongo in Cameroon, with the goal of preventing the trapping of 15,000 Grey Parrots a year. WPT will continue to do all it can for this species, and would welcome funding from anyone interested in helping.

To learn more about our efforts to save this species:

• PsittaScene Volume 14, Number 2; May 2002; pages 2-3
• PsittaScene Volume 13, Number 2; May 2001; pages 8-10

To help save this parrot please:

Or Contact Us to learn more about how you can help.