I have the coolest job, please allow me to convince you.
The other day I was riding Reddy, my red hot motorized two wheeled stallion, down the sinuous national park road when I felt a big smile crowding my face in the helmet. A subliminal smile such as that, just like snorting when I'm laughing, is a genuine indication of pure unadulterated happiness. I had lots to smile about: there I was commuting to a day's worth of Echo nesting sites, looking out past sawtoothed mountain peaks to the sea, feeling like I wouldn't change a thing about my life. That is a quality moment.
So what exactly is Echo work all about? Well in order to appreciate the job one needs to hear the Echo parakeet's story. Here goes my version... Echos (Psittacula eques), the masters of forest camouflage, are feathered with a palate of green hues: lime, sweet pea, broccoli and a touch of aquamarine kale. At three years of age sexually mature males develop attractive red beaks and black rings around their necks with a hint of blue and pink on the nape. Emerald green females have plain black beaks and an almost undetectable pencil thin necklet. This get up makes for very classy looking birds. I find their chubby cheeks, fat tongues and nasal duck like squeaks and whimpers endearing. I suppose that the fact they use their big noses as a third foot is also winning.
An Echo pair, Bagel and a shy Mafuta, patiently waiting for me to finish up an egg check up their nest box.
As far as we know Echos were common on Mauritius until the 1800s when they began to decline along with the forests. That tendency to rarity resulted in fewer than 20 wild birds by 1986. And a postage stamp sized native forest is all that's left now, relatively speaking. The shrinking native forests are continually reorganized by more vigorous floral exotics hailing from the continents where they have perfected the art of competition and survival. Similarly native animals are duking it out with an ark of introduced hairy milk-drinking beasts (a.k.a. mammals) with a taste for eggs (rats, pigs, monkeys, cats, mongoose, etc.) together with the beaked cavity-dwelling variety like Ring-necked parakeets and Mynahs. So with their home base shrinking and unwelcome guests moving in on all fronts you can understand why the ecologically less confrontational Echos got pushed out - well nearly pushed out.
Echo conservation efforts got serious in 1987 with the intention of increasing the Echo population. Over the years field techniques have been layered finessing the perpetual fight against predators and competitors and boosting Echo's reproductive success with nest rescues, chick fostering, and supplying nest boxes. For the past month just on the brink of the breeding season I have been preparing cavities and nest boxes for their feathered tenants making the trees unappealing to other critters. The Echo Team has been rat proofing the nest trees by wrapping the trunks in sheets of slippery black plastic to prevent rats from climbing up to the nest. Poison is also put out at the base of the tree to keep the rat numbers at bay.
Echo 1 a.k.a. Mike the tree tailor.
Years of trial and error have shaped the nest boxes into efficient Echo generators. Check it out! The wooden nest boxes are quite tall with an access hole at the top and the nest lined with wood shavings at the bottom. The Echos mamas get in and out through the top and Echo workers access the nest through a special hinged door near the base. The depth of the faux cavities ensures that sticky little monkey fingers can't reach any eggs and that White Tailed Tropic Birds (my fave Round Island birds who sat on my head last season) who compete with Echos for cavities, don't set up shop. The boxes are mounted on metal or faux wood brackets which are then screwed into the tree. This keeps termites off since they won't tread on anything other than wood! Who knew!? This season to discourage honeybees from building hives inside the boxes we have added another ingenuity layer to the box design. Someone told us that bees won't hang honeycombs from a smooth surface so we stapled a piece of plastic rat guard sheet to the ceiling to force them to keep looking elsewhere. The new feature seems to be anti-bee alright but we still have to evict hoards of scary wasps. I never imagined I'd be dangling out of trees donning a bee suit armed with a bee smoker. Surreal!
The nesting sites are scattered around the Black River Gorges National Park. Some are nest boxes and a few are in natural cavities. Many of the trees are enormous things resembling Ents from Lord of the Rings. They are ambassadors from a different time. No one is sure of how old they are since trees in the tropics don't have growth rings but those giants must be a couple years old at least. There aren't many of them left around poking thorough the guava thicket that blankets the gorges. The views from them are dramatic: waterfalls, rivers, cliffs, the ocean, and a kaleidoscope of green. One of my faves is at a nest site called Trivial Pursuit.
The tree climbing system is pretty ingenious too, if I may say so. Instead of dragging an extension ladder around the jungle to access nests the way I did when I worked on flying squirrels in Canada, we use ropes to access the Echo sites. A lead nylon string is catapulted over a sturdy branch or tree fork and a climbing rope is pulled up in its place. One end of the rope is tied on to an anchor point and the Echo worker shimmies up the other end with the help of two jumars. To come down to earth we abseil like some kind of a FBI special secret service unit. It may all sound a bit confusing but once you get the hang of it it's really quite simple. Much sexier than carrying a ladder down into the gorges!
Mike abseiling down from Two Brothers cavity after checking for eggs.
The Echos were impressed with all our laborious preparations and have taken up residency in most of the boxes and natural cavities, 60-some out of a possible 100. The last two weeks I have been sneaking up to nests to check for eggage when the females dashed out for a quick feed provisioned by their attentive males. The idea is to cause as little disturbance to the birds as possible so we do a lot of watching and waiting for birds to leave the nest sites before we check things out up close. There were many indications that eggs were on the way. At first there were little bowl shaped depressions in the shavings where a bird got cozy. Then bits of down began appearing. This went on for a few weeks until finally on Friday I got eggage action to write home about. 
Eggs are odd things. I mean why would you make a baby, package it up in a shell, poop it out, and then spend weeks sitting on it!? Why not just cook the thing inside you and pop it out when its good and done? Seems a bit bizarre really, but I suppose that life has evolved lots of interesting strategies to replicate itself.
A nest in a cavity pre-eggage action.
Hopefully this season will be a productive one for the green dudes and the population will expand a smidgen more. Currently the population is estimated between 288 and 431 birds depending on which counting technique you go by. Either way it is an amazing improvement over 20 birds some 30 years ago. But there are always surprises and complications along the conservation path. Over the last decade a viral disease called Parrot Beak and Feather Disease (PBFD) has been hitting the population hard. The young appear to be most susceptible with juvenile fatality sitting at 50%. Research is being carried out to understand what's going on and what the management implications will be.
The Echo Team is responsible for doing everything possible to encourage the Echo population to continue growing. Our over all mission is "More Echos" with lots to be learned along the way. But to be honest, sometimes all this conservation work seems like nothing more than a band aid with the real problems being far removed from the forests and mountain peaks. The bigger problems are rooted in our value systems and habits. Understanding that I recognize that if no one is providing emergency care to animals like the Echo parakeet while someone else is addressing the broader issues, then surely the Echos will just bleep off the screen. It takes a lot more than climbing trees and feeding birds to save them with room for many to partake.
Echo Team: Aurelie, Tom (visiting Echo worker), Mike, Ewa and Heather our fearless coordinator.
