Abstract

Dear Friends,

For more than two years, the African grey parrot has been our flag species and significant investment in infrastructure, capacity building and human resources were made to enable us to enhance the management of rescued individuals. The centre was upgraded to provide the best possible care to all rescued parrots and give them the best chance to be released back into the wild.

It was a great achievement and a consecration after several years of efforts, to develop the reference national rescue, rehabilitation and release (3R) programme for the species in Cameroon. By doing so, the Limbe Wildlife Centre, with support from Pandrillus and several sponsors, became the only governmental institution in the country with the facilities, expertise and resources to bring a positive change for the conservation of the species nationwide with regional and international impact.

Out of the 395 parrots seized from illegal trafficking in 2019 and 2020, 236 survived (60%). Throughout 2020, we successfully transferred 215 individuals from quarantine to the large rehabilitation aviary (93% of survivors) and then 125 parrots (32% of total rescued individuals; 53% of the survivors) to the soft release aviary. All of them were successfully released back into the wild. Thanks to high standards procedures, we reduced the mortality rate at 40%, with the majority of the 159 dead individuals passing away during the first 3 weeks of quarantine, as a result of their poor condition upon arrival and the incredibly stressful events they went through since their capture (transport, overcrowding, rough handling etc).

In 2021, the majority of the 111 remaining individuals should be released. It is expected that 10 individuals would not be suitable for release as they suffer from disabilities.

Thanks to our donors, we sustained our African grey parrot rehabilitation team, which consists of 1 project coordinator, 3 medical staff and 4 animal care staff, as well as a couple of security officers and foreign volunteers.

In 2020 only, 17,200 kg of diverse food were fed to the 236 African grey parrots and our vet team provided constant medication and special care and performed a total of 1120 health checks on 348 birds.

The yearly cost to run the programme, as well as conducting much-needed #ProtectWildlife and Art4Nature education and awareness programmes was more than 7,000 USD. Unfortunately, 98% of the budget was covered by Pandrillus. The lack of support provided by the Government is the major challenge to the sustainability of our project. Further advocacy efforts, as well as education to the public, will be instrumental in engaging the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife to take more ownership and commit to the protection of this emblematic species. Nonetheless, despite the pandemic crisis that affected us all, our results and progress have been extremely encouraging and represent a milestone.

Through the LWC, Cameroon is taking an important step to better manage the population of confiscated African grey parrots.

But there is still a lot of work ahead of us: post-release monitoring using GPS tags, genetic analysis, education, replication of soft-release in protected areas and of course continued daily care and rehabilitation. Thank you to all our donors for your trust. We count on your renewed support to get closer to our common goal and ensure the survival of the endangered African grey parrot in Cameroon.

Limbe, 30 April 2021

Peggy MOTSCH

Manager, Limbe Wildlife Centre

peggy@limbewildlife.org +237 698 87 70 02)