You need to have a thick skin, in more ways than one, if you’re working with Thick-billed parrots. In addition to occasionally meeting the powerful impact of their beaks, when working to protect this gorgeous species that has a taste for pine nuts, you have to wrestle with the reality that there are only at most 4,000 of these beauties left in the wild.

Luckily there are those that are overcoming short-term setbacks with a long-term commitment to this magnificent creature’s survival.

More than six years have passed since the Wildlands Project and its Mexican conservation partners signed an historic Thick-billed parrot protection agreement with members of Ejido Cebadillas (also known as Ejido Tutuaca) in northern Chihuahua. Considered a controversial maneuver at that time, the agreement today stands as one of the most notable conservation success stories of the new century.

Possible return to Arizona? Thick-billed Parrots once filled the pine forests of the Chiricauhua Mountains of southeastern Arizona. With the protection of breeding habitat at Cebadillas, conservationists hope that one day these spectacular birds will once again be able to follow their annual migrations north to the Sky Islands.

The northernmost species of parrot, Thick-bills are native WHAT ARE THE CHANCES? to the Sierra Madre Occidental. They nest in old growth pine snags and feed primarily on the large pine cones of species such as Chihuahua pine. But destruction of 99 percent of the regional old growth forests and the illegal harvest of snags led to a dramatic decline in Thick-billed parrot populations. In the 1950s, the last Thick-billed parrots were seen on their former range in southeastern Arizona. Historically, Thick-bills migrated as far north as the Mogollon Rim in Central Arizona.

In 1994, a nesting concentration of Thick-bills was discovered at Ejido Cebadillas by Danish biologist, Martjan Lammertink, who was searching for the last remaining Imperial woodpecker. In 1996, biologists from Instituto Tecnologico y Estudios Superiores Monterrey (ITESM), led by Dr. Ernesto Enkerlin, estimated that there were more than 200 nests in the area, by far the largest remaining nesting area in the hemisphere.

By early 2000, the prognosis for long-term health of the parrot population at Cebadillas seemed grim, indeed. The ejido, a 40,000-acre agricultural cooperative with 74 member residents, located 150 miles south of the U.S. border in the Sierra Madre Occidental, had signed a logging contract scheduled to deforest thousands of acres of its old-growth pine forest— forest that was home to more than half of all remaining Thick-billed parrots in the world.

In an effort to save the parrot population, an arduous, multi-year negotiation process ensued with the ejido members to halt the logging contract. A precedent-setting “conservation lease” was executed. The ejido would cancel the logging contract in lieu of payment of 50 percent of the net value of the uncut timber within the 6,000 acres to be protected, to be paid over the following 15 years. Other income would be generated through ecotourism generated under the auspices of a “Cebadillas Ecotourism Protocol.” The agreement included the construction of three cabins to lodge bird-watchers and other nature enthusiasts, fencing of the protected area, and a watchman chosen from the ejido members.

Today the Wildlands Project, with support from generous parrot enthusiasts around North America, continues to fulfill the contract with the ejido at Cebadillas.

The director of Naturalia and Wildlands Project Board Member, Oscar Moctezuma, said he hoped the protected parrot reserve will serve as a means to show private landowners in Mexico that income from conservation can equal or surpass that from logging and other resource extraction processes. “In 15 years, we are confident that the Ejido members will choose to renew the agreement, after they have had a chance to see the full range of benefits that conservation can bring to their community,” he said.

Kim Vacariu