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Yves de Soye
Advisory Board Member
For more
than ten years, my career has been dedicated to the conservation of
endangered tropical biodiversity and ecosystems. In the field, while
working on taxa such as hornbills, pigeons, antpittas, deer and pigs,
my primary conclusion was that parrots are terribly difficult to
study, particularly outside the breeding season.
In the six years I later spent at Loro Parque Fundación —where I
coordinated almost 30 parrot conservation projects in Latin America,
Africa and SE Asia— I however found how enormously valuable flagships
wild parrots can be to achieve measurable successes. Parrots also
deserve special attention given that they are the family of birds with
the greatest proportion of threatened species.
I believe that Parrots International, due to its devoted founders and
friends, has every potential to gradually evolve into becoming a
leading parrot conservation group in the US. This will depend on the
quality of the projects it supports and implements, on the one hand,
and the financial resources it can harness, on the other hand. As one
of its advisors, I am fully available to support PI in both these
aspects. While the last two years have already been highly successful,
I would like to see its annual programme budget increase five-fold
over the next five years.
Lastly, I particularly endorse PI’s intention to remain an objective,
neutral organisation that fights for the best of these amazing birds
irrespective of the institutional and personal interests that have
been
around parrot conservation for far too many years.
Yves de Soye, September 2005
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