Ernesto Ankerlin-Hufflach
Appearances
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
I'm known by some people as the Mexican Parrot Man.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
One day he told me that he really wanted to be a conservationist, but at that time in Mexico, nobody even knew what conservation was. So I sort of said, well, I'll do what my father couldn't do. I'll do it myself.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
We were negotiating that with the community, and they depended on the forest, and here we were telling them not to use the forest. And they probably would have stayed that way, except... And so the whole negotiation turned around and we finally signed the deal.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
And she says, I know who you are. My mother told me about you, and we're going to renew this contract for another 15 years. So it was amazing to me. It was just like going around in a very beautiful way.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
We are starting to see that maybe some of this is what we call adaptive plasticity. And that means that the gene pool is now favoring the parrots that have the ability to use these new types of landscape arrangements and this new place that they live in, which has nothing to do with what it was 100 years ago.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
We're seeing in Mexico that many people in the cities now realize, even if they will never go to see the parrots, that if there's a healthy population of parrots, there's healthy forests. If there's healthy forests, There's climate resilience, there's water, there's opportunities for recreation, etc.