In two to three years, ACTP (Association for the conservation of threatened parrots) would like to start releasing of the extinct Spix Macaws in cooperation with Al Wabra from Qatar. An official ACTP representative Katrin Scholtyssek announced this at the Czech Avicultural Convention on the last Saturday. She was accompanied by the ACTP president Martin Guth.
Katrin was not the only foreign speaker at this convention. Juan Cornejo, a bird curator of the most complete parrot collection in Loro Parque, Tony Silva, american breeder and author of many well-known publications and Anil Garg had also lectures. After the last presentation, all international speakers together with the only Czech speaker Martin Smrcek sit together in front of the crowd and faced to questions of 150 attenders.
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Katrin Scholtyssek also mentioned that ACTP and Al Wabra are going to build a new in-situ breeding center for Spix’s Macaws, which is necessary for future reintroduction, in the following months. However, before the release the original devastated habitat has to be recovered.
The next lecture from Juan Cornejo provided detailed information on parrot hand feeding. Juan introduced the whole hand feeding procedure at Baby Station which is a new facility at Loro Parque. Before that he also talked about incubation. In the last year, Loro Parque raised more than 900 parrots and their entire collection counts over 3000 parrots in total.
Tony Silva was the only speaker who had also a lecture at this event in the last year. Because of Tony’s amazing personality the talks have always been well received by all attenders. His lecture was about hand feeding but also about parrot breeding in general.
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The convention was also attended by a group of 13 Indian aviculturists headed by Anil Garg, Avian Society of India president. Anil had the last lecture and introduced the Indian aviculture. He also talked about his personal experience with breeding of such rare species like Palm Cockatoo or Hawk-headed Parrot. This talk received many positive comments and it clearly showed that despite different climate, culture or religion, aviculture all over the world is the same in one thing – passion.
Miguel Gomez Garza, well known field ornithologist and aviculturist from Mexico also attended this event. In total, the Czech Avicultural Convention hosted people from seven countries – Czech Republic, Slovakia, USA, Mexico, India, Germany and Spain.
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Title photo: (c) Jan Potucek