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Green rumped parrotlet4/3/2023 ![]() ![]() She lays an egg every day or two until completing a clutch of anywhere from five to ten eggs. The female begins spending a lot of time in the nest box in the few days prior to laying. Fire up the mood music, settle in for the night, and ten days later… They select one of the Forpus project’s fine nesting boxes, defend it from other parrotlet pairs, and start to get cozy. It all starts when a pair of parrotlets get that glint in their eyes. I present here an annotated collection of photos documenting the entry of new parrotlets into this world. Over the course of three months of field work I monitored dozens of parrotlet nests from start to finish, taking care to snap some pictures now and again. Last fall I traveled to the Venezuelan llanos and was introduced to the charming little Green-rumped Parrotlet Forpus passerinus. Getting intimate with a species over the course of the breeding cycle is one of the more rewarding aspects of birding, and field research too. You don’t really know a bird until you’ve studied it on its breeding grounds. Text and photographs copyright Nick Sly (except Rae Okawa where indicated) and are used with his permission. Green-rumped Parrotlets: from egg to adult ![]() Backpack on, nest check clipboard attached, small folding chair over one shoulder, scope over the other shoulder. Empty out the rubber boots of any nighttime invaders before pulling them on. Lather on the SPF 50 sunblock and don my field hat. Load up the gear – mini maglight in one breast pocket, field notebook and pencils in the other, big bottle of water, binoculars, camera. My morning routine has already been simplified down to the essentials – roll out of bed and out from under the protective mosquito net, pull on dirty odorous field clothes, munch down a quick breakfast. Not good, I think – it will probably be another scorcher. To set the scene, we’ve re-posted the opening paragraph and photograph from Nick’s first post for us… Naturally, we wanted to hear more about parrotlets, so Nick graciously shared the beautiful photo-essay below. Nick wrote a guest post on Forpus passerinus and the Ornithologists of Masaguaral which was full of passion, humor, and insight into his work while on location in Venezuela. The population of parrotlets they studied was located on one of the many huge hatos (cattle ranches) in the Venezuelan llanos, a vast swath of flat flooded savannah in the central third of the country that drains into the Rio Orinoco. It has been introduced in Jamaica, Curacao, Barbados and Tobago, and was not recorded on Trinidad prior to 1916.Nick Sly, a friend of 10,000 Birds who writes intermittently at the thoroughly-recommended Biological Ramblings, is an ornithologist who graduated not so long ago from Cornell only to be cast out into the real world where he keeps a wry eye on all things biological! Back in October 2008, in his first field job out of school, he helped a Cornell PhD student, Karl, with his dissertation on vocal communication in Green-rumped Parrotlets Forpus passerinus. It is a resident breeding bird in tropical South America, from Colombia and Trinidad south and east to the Guianas and Brazil. For these reasons the species is evaluated as Least Concern. The population size has not been quantified, but it is not believed to approach the thresholds for Vulnerable under the population size criterion (10% in ten years or three generations, or with a specified population structure). This species has an extremely large range, and hence does not approach the thresholds for Vulnerable under the range size criterion (Extent of Occurrence 30% decline over ten years or three generations).
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