Protecting threatened tropical birds

Some of the world’s best-loved and most distinctive tropical bird species are facing extinction as their habitats are destroyed and they are captured in staggering numbers by human hunters.  

But a research team at Manchester Met, led by Professor Stuart Marsden, is finding fresh approaches to conservation — with a focus on the human actions driving ecological change and exploiting new technology. 

Stuart is the University’s Professor of Conservation Ecology. He’s spent the vast majority of his working life studying tropical wildlife and thinking about ways to save it from extinction.  

It’s a fascination that began as an 18-year-old travelling in Sudan as the famine hit and the country tipped into civil war.  

“I decided that just looking at the animals wasn’t enough, and that conserving them was going to be the main focus of my career,” he said. 

It’s a career that has helped to establish Manchester Met as one of the leading conservation universities in the UK.  

The University’s conservation, evolution and behaviour research group, including Marsden, Huw Lloyd and Alex Lees, has produced more than 150 papers since 2000, many focused on tropical birds and their habitats as well as the development of new ecological research methods. 

The stakes are high. Around half of all bird species are exclusively tropical and 80% of threatened bird species are found in tropical forests. These habitats are being destroyed or degraded and many species are being hunted or captured in unsustainably high numbers.  

Saving the African Grey parrot

Marsden’s recent study on the African Grey Parrot discovered declines of 90-99% in the last 25 years – the first robust evidence that trade and habitat loss were pushing the species to the verge of extinction in Ghana. Such long-term evidence of multi-decadal declines in tropical wildlife is rare and cause for real concern.  

“Parrots are so widely traded because they’re very popular,” Stuart said. “They’re in great danger of being loved to death. 

“The African Grey is one of the classic parrots – it’s the kind of bird that everybody recognises. It’s been probably the most significantly traded tropical bird species and the trade has been worth millions of dollars every year,” Stuart said 

The fact that the bird’s natural habitat is in central and west Africa, in remote and often infrequently visited locations, makes gathering reliable data tricky – and helps explain why such a sharp decline could go unnoticed by the international community.  

By working with African universities and non-governmental organisations, the Manchester Met research group has been able to base two PhD researchers in the region, contributing to projects to establish reliable population monitoring and support conservation efforts.  

Such data have been the key to changing international policy and securing vital protections for at-risk species.  

The International Union for Conservation of Nature maintains a ‘red list’ quantifying extinction risk in wildlife, which is used by governments and regulatory bodies worldwide to prioritise conservation action on the most threatened species. By December 2018, Manchester Met research had underpinned the red-listing of nearly 200 species, around one in 10 of all threatened tropical land birds.  

The evidence Stuart published on the African Grey prompted its reclassification as an endangered species, securing a total trade ban in 183 countries through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. 

Population levels are now recovering in some areas.  

Building sustainable, local conservation 

But the group’s goal is broader than saving individual endangered species. According to Stuart, for conservation to be sustainable there needs to be a greater emphasis on supporting and building the capacity of local authorities to manage their wildlife better.  

The team has delivered training and workshops to NGOs, government officials, university students and BirdLife International partner organisations in some 30 tropical countries. 

“One of the things that I’m most proud of is that we’ve adapted some quite technical ecological methods to make them cost-effective and more straightforward so conservationists with little formal statistical training or busy national park guards can monitor the population of the African Greys without much fuss. 

 “We’ve developed a good reputation in the last 20 years of being objective people who can report situations as we see them, based on what the data tell us. 

“That’s the important part of our work, not necessarily lobbying governments or doing the conservation work, which is much better done by local organisations working alongside local communities.” 

The group’s research is used internationally as evidence for conservation and park management activity in protected areas – from the Philippines to Peru, Brazil to China. 

Since his arrival at Manchester Met in 2016, Stuart’s colleague Alex Lees has helped drive forward understanding of how land use changes affect biodiversity and ecosystems, and the limits of possible trade-offs with economic development.  

As one of the steering committee members of the Sustainable Amazon Network (SAN), he led collection of the largest avian diversity sampling ever undertaken in the tropics. The findings highlighted a need to be careful in prioritising carbon without considering biodiversity. 

Stuart said: “It’s very satisfying to look at the places we have worked – in South America, Southeast Asia and Africa – and the number of colleagues from those places that we have been able to capacity build with. The reach of our conservation work is quite impressive.” 

Pioneering new techniques

The research group has forged a reputation for developing new ecological and analytical techniques, which are helping conservationists better assess population numbers and changes, ecological requirements and threats to endangered species. 

Advances in digital technology are creating new opportunities for conservation scientists that would have been previously hard to imagine.  

Instead of protracted trips into the jungle, researchers now make much greater use of remote cameras and acoustic recorders to gather sampling data at a distance, which is then analysed through sophisticated computer models.  

“There’s a bit less marching around the forest and a bit more appliance of science,” Stuart said. 

By applying computer modelling techniques to the data gathered, Manchester Met researchers are able to work through huge volumes of data relatively quickly. Once the technology is configured, a few seconds of a bird call from a target species can be identified and isolated among days of recordings – making much better use of research time and resources. 

As a result, it also becomes easier to identify and track rare species, which are likely to be seen or heard much less frequently, or conduct research in inhospitable terrain.  

Connecting local communities to conservation efforts 

But for all the advantages and advances offered by modern technology, so much comes back to people – understanding their lives and motivations better to help work with them to design sustainable solutions that protect wildlife. 

Recent work by Manchester Met lecturer Huw Lloyd in China has focused on bird ecology, and in particular the needs of the endangered Red-Crowned Crane in the Yellow River delta. His work with Chinese academics was the first to reveal the critical importance of tidal mudflat crabs as a winter food source, the importance of natural wetlands and the effects of wildlife tourism on crane behaviour. 

The findings were timely. Birdwatching has become a fantastically popular hobby in China. The speed and scale of the surge in its popularity created a very real risk that the desire to see endangered birds would ultimately drive some to extinction.  

“In many ways it’s a very good thing that people in China are interested in going out and seeing wildlife and taking photos of it.  It helps make the connection between people and wildlife just like it did for me as a teenager. But with so many people wanting to do it, there can be real problems,” Stuart said. 

Having identified the risk meant that research could inform conservation – and a code of conduct for wildlife photographers has been developed and adopted. Rather than restrict birdwatching, it helps local communities to enjoy their pastime sustainably. 

“Perhaps the biggest issue for now and for the future is getting people in developing countries on board with our ideas of conservation,” Stuart said.  

“Conservationists have been quite colonialist. There’s a tendency to impose Western views of what conservation should be and how people should act on people from very different cultures and with different upbringings to ourselves, especially people who can’t afford to have the luxury of protecting the wildlife around them.”   

Better to work with local communities, organisations and authorities, he argues, and in doing so create ways of ensuring that conservation efforts are sustainable.  

Solving the songbird crisis 

It’s an approach that conservation scientists from Manchester Met have been using while working on the Asian songbird crisis.  

Hundreds of songbird species are being taken from the wild. Many are sought after to enter into singing competitions or to be kept as ornamental pets. 

Data collected so far indicates that around 75 million birds are kept as pets on the Indonesian island of Java alone, with more living in captivity than in the wild, raising fears about possible extinction.  

“The most important work we’re doing is about people rather than wildlife. 

“Like a lot of conservationists, we’re increasingly looking at the social science aspects of conservation - people’s livelihoods, their aspirations and their perceptions of the world.” 

It’s starting to yield results. Demand appears to be reducing or becoming more managed. Local communities are starting to find alternative livelihoods, rather than selling captured birds. The national parks are operating better management protocols. And local companies are cooperating in the creation of safe havens for species at risk. 

The natural next step in capacity building is citizen science, involving local communities directly in research projects. It’s something the Manchester Met team have done in Indonesia, where the opportunity proved surprisingly popular. 

Researchers formed partnerships with local universities and birdwatching clubs to promote a month-long fieldwork project. Set up as a competition with prizes and celebration ceremonies, it generated more than 100,000 records in four weeks.  

“The whole thing went viral. We hoped to get a few people involved but it really took off. For me, that’s the way forward. It did two things: it generated a huge database that we would never have been able to generate as scientists alone, but it also connected hundreds of young people with nature and conservation. They went out, had a good time and contributed to the conservation of their country’s wildlife.”