ECLECTUS PARROTS
IN THE WILD
IN PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Courtesy of Dan Meyer and missionary, Larry Lovell, Papua New Guinea.

In the summer of 2000, Eclectus Connection list member, Dan Meyer, offered to send our questions about wild Eclectus parrots to his missionary friend in Papua, New Guinea. Dan's friend, missionary Larry Lovell, was both thoughtful and thorough in his replies to our many questions. TEC list member, Mary Nogare, kindly donated her time and editorial expertise to organize the information into an enjoyable question and answer format. We hope that you will be delighted and enlightened by this rare glimpse into Eclectus life in Papua New Guinea.

From personal e-mail correspondance with missionary Larry Lovell in Papua New Guinea, Summer 2000

NEW GUINEA BACKGROUND

GEOGRAPHY, TOPOGRAPHY AND CLIMATE

Q: What is the climate like in Papua New Guinea? Is it basically rain forest?

A: Though you, Dan, already know quite a bit about Papua New Guinea (PNG) from your reading and your family background, for the benefit of the others I must mention that PNG enjoys an extremely varied topography/geography, and supports several different habitats or climates.

Though the entire country is located near the equator, north of the Tropic, the mountains rise to over 14,000 feet. In fact, this morning and the past several mornings, though we should be entering summer, it has been pretty cold here in Eastern Highlands Province — near 40°F — whereas I just returned from Alotau, Milne Bay Province (see map below) last Friday, and it was very warm there.

Connie thinks she has seen one or two Eclectus here in the highlands, but I don't recall seeing any, although there are several other varieties of small parrots and either parakeets or lorikeets here. Generally speaking, the parrots here congregate in fairly large groups, as they do in Australia. I lived in the outback (Alice Springs, NT) for three years and saw lots of what the Aussies call budgies or budgerigars (parakeets) and galahs, the gray and pink parrots mentioned in your questions. They always associated in large groups, as well. Perhaps it is a c haracteristic of Pacific parrots. For that reason I don't think it's easy to see just one or two — though she very well may have. More on that later. But for now, let's just rule out Eclectus here in the highlands.

The Minaveha speakers we work with live on Fergusson Island in Milne Bay Province. Fergusson is the middle and largest island in the D'Entrecasteaux Group, and with an area of 505 square miles is almost exactly the size of Oahu, the island of Hawai'i on which Honolulu is located. The little red arrow marks our village allocation on the map below.

Fergusson is a rather mountainous island, even as Pacific volcanic islands go, and the SW-projecting peninsula along the coast of which the Minaveha speakers live, has a steep spine and a sheer drop into the sea right where the point of the arrow is. Atop that spine are few tall trees, the rocky surface incapable of supporting many of them.

The people make their gardens along the sides of the mountains. There is little soil and there are many large rocks, so wide terracing (like that seen in the Philippines) is impossible. Some of the slopes are 45°, and it is quite a hike from the coastal villages up to where the yams and taro are planted —around 45 minutes to an hour. In the highlands [our translation centre here is at 5200 feet, the altitude of Denver!] it rains quite a lot, but out on Fergusson Island we get only around 50 inches of rain a year. During the windy season (April to October), when the southeasterlies are blowing it seldom rains. Fergusson can hardly be described as a rain forest habitat, though vegetation is plentiful and the jungle (known as "bush" here) advances very rapidly if unchecked; but, it appears to be an ideal environment for Eclectus.

When the Minaveha people plant gardens they use slash and burn techniques. The size and number of rocks prevents any kind of mechanized approach; so, over the years, they have cut down all but a few of the large trees that may have once grown on the slopes. Today, because of a rapidly increasing population [mostly due to better medical care which prevents quite so many people dying from complications of delivery (PNG women have an unusually high rate of retained placenta, perhaps as many as 5-10%), malaria, pneumonia, and TB (in that order)] they chop back and burn off a section of the jungle after only five years. Traditionally land lay fallow for 7 years before recultivation. There is great pressure today upon all the Minaveha people just to survive in a place so difficult to cultivate. As the fallow times for the land decrease under the pressure of an advancing population, it is understandable that the land will yield fewer and smaller yams than in years past when the fallow time was 40% longer.

In this first section I've tried to help your group understand the nature of the environment where we work — both for the parrots and for the people. I can't really speak for other sections of the country. I simply do not get to travel that extensively, since the nature of the work we do doesn't lend itself to widespread travel. Travel here is also difficult and expensive.

Suffice it to say, the people don't take threats to their survival lightly. Several years ago pigs were getting into their gardens and they met as a community and decided to kill all their domesticated pigs. This would be the cultural equivalent of all Texans getting together and deciding to kill all the steers. Usually, it wasn't even their domesticated pigs that got into the gardens, but they were the unwitting instigators. Wild boars, bush pigs, which roam the mountains, would come down to the villages at night to mate with the sows there. On their way back to their mountain habitat, they would stop for a midnight snack in the gardens and trash them. The people had to take extreme measures to insure the survival of their gardens — there was no other choice. Pigs naturally root and forage, and the Minavehan's main foods are root crops: yams and taro. Eclectus poses a similar threat to crops that grow above ground.

I must admit, most of our observations of Eclectus have been casual, very unscientific, and we have taken no notes. In addition, due to my wife's continuing health problems, we have spent little time in our village allocation over the past 4 years, so some of my memories are not fresh. Finally, some of the questions require information which neither we nor our village friends have.

I've done my best with the rest of them. All answers apply to our village allocation on Fergusson Island, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea.

A: In Tok Pisin ("Talk Pidgin" or "Pidgin English") the locals usually do not discriminate between species of animals, and normally they call all birds 'pisin'. The word 'pisin' in Tok Pisin is from the English word "pidgin". Of course, "pidgin" is a formal linguistic term referring to "a language with a markedly reduced grammatical structure, lexicon, and stylistic range, compared with other languages, and which is the native language of no one" (David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 1985 ff). They also use the term 'pisin' (derived from English 'pigeon') as a general term for all birds. Since the pronunciation of the two is very similar, there is no difference in the Tok Pisin spelling. Actually Tok Pisin is now becoming the native language of quite a few people where vernaculars are dying out and English is the prestige language for them. Since Tok Pisin is more like English than anything else, knowing it helps one learn English easier in school.

On the island where we work (Fergusson Island, the middle large island of the D'Entrecasteaux Group, in Milne Bay Province) Tok Pisin is known only by a few people who have learned it elsewhere. It is not spoken there as it is in most parts of the mainland, and out on the larger New Guinea islands (New Ireland, New Britain, Manus, etc.).

In the language we work in (Minaveha) there are two separate words for the local Eclectus. The female is called 'anahana', where the 'h' in Minaveha is pronounced more like a 'g' in English. [Actually, the sound is a voiced, velar fricative, symbolized by a small Greek gamma in the International Phonetic Alphabet.]; The male is called 'gewani'. Their traditional understanding of reproduction is not the same as a current western view, and way back they may actually have thought that the two were different birds, since the coloring is so markedly different, and normally during the day the two sexes are not often seen together.

A: Only the fact that I have already mentioned, that in Minaveha the males and females have separate names, as if they were different species.

A: I wouldn't have a clue what the local species of Eclectus is. The only other comprehensive lexicon done between a language on our island and English was done in what was then called the Morima language (today known as Molima or Tola'ai). Their related word for the male is 'gewala', but its entry shows only 'parrot' with no discrimination for the sex, as in Minaveha. No entry akin to Minaveha 'anahana' was made in that lexicon.

A: I dealt with this info in Part 1, but, approx. 50 inches of rain per year is normal on Fergusson Island. However, during the rainy season, cyclones in the vicinity can increase that amount by as much as 1 inch per hour. Within a one week period back in the late '80s we received 38 inches of rain.

A: Our observations of them have always been limited to around 50 meters or more, since they generally avoid villages and the people who live there. We have seen them during light showers going right on with their normal behavior

Q: Have you seen them bathe by fluttering among the wet leaves?

A: I guess this is possible. When they are in a tree feeding they normally move around quite a bit; and, as described in Part 1, there is a continual enforcing of the pecking order. So the younger and smaller birds flit about quite a bit, even when it is not raining. We have not observed them during a real downpour (because we are usually inside, and the view to the jungle out the back of our house is quite restricted because the mountain rises quite steeply and rapidly, cutting off our view of the tops of the trees higher up the mountain where we usually see most birds).

Q: Do they seem like fun loving, crazy, wild, and just joyous type of birds or are they all straight business types?

A: This is an interesting question. Because they so often make such a great commotion (an effect which is enhanced because they are usually in large groups), it might be easy to get the impression that they are unruly, crazy animals. However, the enforcing of the pecking order by the older males indicates that they take their social order seriously. Older birds insist on their feeding rights, defend their favorite roosting sites, and, in general, maintain order. Secondly, the fact that they congregate in large groups testifies to their ongoing ability to keep that group together. If there were too much fighting, the large groups would be likely to fragment into smaller ones. Among many parrots there is apparently a strongly felt need for group membership. The price paid for the group's ongoing existence is frustration on the part of the younger, smaller members.

Q: How do they seem to treat each other?

A: Because the males usually congregate in their groups, and the females usually congregate in their groups, we have not often observed fights which were directly attributable to male superiority in relation to mating rights. However, it may well be that the enforcing of the pecking order on a daily, on-going basis achieves just this goal. At mating time, each male bird's place in the potential mating system is already established. Although parrots are notorious the world over for kissing between mated pairs, Eclectus are very rarely seen in mated pairs. The normal kind of co-operative preening is normally reserved for the mated pairs in other species, but for Eclectus I just can't say. I simply have not observed the mated pairs together.

Q: Do the males and females hang out together, or do you see green flocks of males or red flocks of females?

A: Always and only in separate groups. How they handle their mating is something unknown to us. Perhaps it is nocturnal — something rare among birds. Again, this is likely the reason the Minavehan's have separate words for the two sexes.

Q: What kind of vocalizations do you hear?

A: There is lots of loud squawking; and there are many sharp, shrill cries, usually several short cries in a row

Q: Are they solitary or social in small or large flocks?

A: [see above and in Part 1.]

Q: How many do they see flying together?

A: For males there can be as many as 20 or 30 in a group. Most groups have around 10 to 15. For females the groups are usually smaller, perhaps 5-10.

Q: Are they loud or quiet while roosting?

A: Once the get settled down for the night, they are fairly quiet; but like most birds, their activities begin long before sun up, and with their activities comes noise, lots of it.

Q: Are they raucous as they fly, or quiet?

A: Raucous mostly. Quite often they [the older males?] sound an alarm when they first take flight, and they all continue to squawk for a while after taking flight. Since they do not normally need to fly over long distances unbroken by trees, their flights away from predators are usually fairly short, and they often squawk the whole way.

Q: Do they go to roost in large groups?

A: Yes.

Q: Do they have a particular roosting tree?

A: Yes.

Q: Do you see more of the males or the females on a regular basis?

A: Males, by far.

A: No, sorry, we haven't.

A: No, we just don't know much about how they care for their young.

Q: How many eclectus are usually in a "group"?

A: This we have answered before: females generally in smaller groups than males. Females around 5-10 in a group; males typically around 10-20, but groups can be as large as 30.

Q: Have you ever located a nest hole in a tree?

A: No.

Q: If so, how high up in the tree?

Q: What size was the opening?

A: Sorry, we just don't know the answers to these questions.

Q: Did the eclectus breed in what seemed like a colony - more than one breeding pair in the area? Or just one pair?

A: From what we can tell of their afternoon roosting habits, we suspect that they nest in groups, too. Other birds in PNG roost AND nest in particular trees. We have seen them gathering in trees far away, but have not been close enough to them to see their nests.

Q: Have you observed young birds being fed by older birds?

A: We have never observed an Eclectus nest or seen two Eclecti caring for young. We have observed the small, young parrots flying with the rest of the flock, but have never seen a small bird returning to a nest.

A: Tree fruits include mango, star fruit (sour sap), pomelo (like a grapefruit, more or less), paupau, a thing called a Papuan peach, which doesn't taste at all like a peach, but does look a bit like one and has a large central pit or stone like a peach, there are also small radish-looking things (round, red on the outside, white on the inside) which are a bit sour and a bit sweet, but mostly watery (called laulau in Tok Pisin, makoikoi in Minaveha) and approximately 50 varieties of bananas, about half of which are ripe (eating) bananas and about half of which are cooking bananas (which cannot be eaten raw — they must be cooked — but only one of them resembles the South American plantains); ground fruits: pineapple; vine fruits include raspberries, passion fruit, and several smaller kinds of berries which I don't think even have English names; bush fruits include guavas and cherry guavas.

Q: If you have seen Eclectus parrots eating in the wild, can you identify what they are
eating? Fruits? Vegetables? Nuts? What seem to be their favorite foods?

A: They love seeds and grains and also get into the sugar cane quite a bit.

Because the soil on Fergusson grows excellent grass, the people have tried for years to supplement their root crop diets with a nutritious grain of some kind. Sugar cane grows very well here, as does another grass crop called pitpit in Tok Pisin. The people really like corn (which in Minaveha is called pegapega) and have planted it repeatedly, but cannot ever get any because of Eclectus. They eat it as soon as there are any kernels on the cob.

According to the people, their favorite food is corn (maize). They eat corn (Minaveha = 'pegapega') and a grass relative of corn, which in Tok Pisin is called 'pitpit' (M = 'tapuana'). I don't really know what 'pitpit' would be called in English. I've never seen it in supermarkets in the US or England or anywhere else in the world, and don't really know what its scientific name is.

The fruit looks a bit like the top of a cattail.

They also get into the sugarcane (M = 'tou', pronounced "TOE-oo"), papayas (M = 'kaiokina') and bananas (generic M = 'moe', pronounced "MO-ay") and several other crops which grow above ground.

There are several kinds of nut trees and they like two or three of them, but they are indigenous here and not found in the US.

Minavehans don't traditionally plant much that grows above ground because the scorching southeasterlies, which blow quite strongly for 7 or 8 months each year, cook the leaves and fruit of above-ground plants. Traditionally they plant root crops: yams, sweet potatoes, taro, tapioca & manioc (both likely later introductions, perhaps by contact with Samoans and Fijians in the 1800's). The parrots are not such pests for the root crops.

Q: How many might feed at a given time in a fruiting tree?

A: They travel in large flocks of 20 or 30 or more, usually, especially the males. The females are usually in smaller groups, sometimes even in threes and fours. Except formating season males and females are very rarely seen together. In fact, the people have a separate name for the male (anahana) and the female (gewani), so they may not have known they were the male and female of the same species. As far as we know, they do not have separate names for the males and females of other animal species — only the Eclectus bears that distinction. There are also several highly prized species / varieties of bird of paradise on Fergusson. The males and females have a very different appearance, but because they are often seen in mated pairs, there are no instances of separate naming that we know of.

Q: Do they pick at lots of different fruits as most birds do, or eat all of only one or two individual fruits?

A: With the exception of bananas, few fruit trees are planted up in the gardens on the mountains. Most fruit trees are planted near the village. Because the pigs couldn't get at them, except to push them over by scratching on them, they were safe. Eclectus avoid men, and villages because they have been hunted as pests. For that reason, we don't see or hear of them eating fruit as often as we hear about them eating grain and nuts. But we understand that they do like paupau (or paw paw).

Q: What is their eating behavior like - is there a lot of bickering or do they
seem like one large family? Are they noisy while eating?

A: They are very noisy all the time. Only when they are asleep are they quiet. There is a lot of bickering and squawking and screeching. They do fight over nuts on trees and try to run each other off. Males quite frequently are seen chasing other males off a preferred limb. There is definitely a pecking order, but the group tends to stay together and flies off together (with and extremely loud commotion) when disturbed by a hawk or kite (eagle).

Q: How have they responded to the farming community? Have they been as disastrous as the Galah cockatoos (who are known for destroying fields and storage areas)?

A: They have responded to gardens by congregating there and eating anything they please, but mostly what they prefer. They have learned to avoid people because the people see them as a much bigger threat than crows. They have crows here, but rarely are more than two or three seen at one time. Crows tend to be rather solitary animals here, and while they are large birds and can eat quite a bit, they don't even begin to compare to the damage that 30 Eclectus can render to a garden in a short while.

Q: Can you give us any other dietary information or suggestions for feeding our Eclectus in captivity?

A: Buy dried corn. Better yet, try getting hold of some dried corn on the cob. Hang it up where they can get at it, and watch what happens! If they are anything like their cousins over here, they should devour it in short order.



Q: What predators are you aware of in your area?

A: Man, eagles, kites, and possibly the lizards that live up in the tops of the coconut palms.

Q: Have you seen a bird being chased or killed? How did the predator go about it?

A: We have seen Eclectus chased by big black crows, but we don't think crows actually prey on parrots; they just get ticked off when the parrots move in on their favorite food supply: men's gardens.

Q: Are Eclectus parrots hunted by local people?

A: Yes.

A: Usually shot with extremely large slingshots. The kids make a slingshot which, for a handle has a long shaft (approx. 5 ft.) which goes all the way down to the ground like a monopod for better steady support. They then fit it with long rubber straps cut from inner tubes. These large slingshots are very capable of bringing down all sorts of birds up in the tops of coconut palms more than 80 ft. high. Normally Eclectus is shot as a pest, and the feathers are kept for decoration. It's odd that in many areas of PNG, people especially like decorating with feathers —especially men's traditional headdresses. However, in our area on Fergusson Island, feathers are not normally part of the dress-up wardrobe.

Q: Are they taken from nests? For food?

A: No.

A: Not that we have seen. Minavehans do not tame birds. The only people we have seen with Eclectus as pets are "dimdims" (whiteskins). The people in the villages agree that the birds are pretty, but their reputation as garden pests outweighs any reason someone would have for feeding them in their homes. BTW: They do not feed their dogs, either — only their pigs.

A: Not by people in our area. But if you were able to be near where our highlands centre is located, to attend an annual "Big Day" you could see the students at the National High School perform one of their "sing-sings" (dances) in traditional dress. Highlanders really go for Eclectus feathers — both read and green — as well as feathers from birds of paradise.

A: In the highlands, they are prized, but they are rare up here.

A: In our areas, yes. The Minavehans shoot and eat them, or shoot them to prevent them from ruining gardens. The Eclecti are some of the worse pests in the local area.

Q: Did the birds that you see look clean and healthy or were there birds that looked terrible?

A: Any birds we have seen look healthy. There is normally abundant food supplies, even during dry season. Mites are common among many birds, and parrots do spend a fair amount of time preening themselves.

A: No, we don't know of any. They do get mites. We know that from our friends up here who have had several different kinds of parrots (including Eclectus, cockatiels, and several types I don't even know the names of).

A: On Fergusson there are lots more of them than the people wish there were! I would say they are numerous, but I wouldn't even hazard a guess at actual numbers.

I hope my answers have not been too disappointing for those of you who love your birds. The fact that they are not as loved in our area as they are in Western countries is directly related to the fact that they compete for food in our area with an expanding population in a place with limited arable land. In the highlands where they are not plentiful (and therefore do not trash people's gardens) they are highly prized for their feathers.