Raising awareness on wildlife trade in Indonesia

Dear Supporters,

Parrots in Indonesia are still one of the most exploited bird species, despite the fact that nationally all parrot species are now protected. The biggest challenge of law enforcement in Indonesia is its archipelagic feature, making it difficult to control the routes of parrot smuggling. To reduce the crime of parrot exploitation in the long term, Wildlife Messengers, Konservasi Kakatua Indonesia, and Pattimura University have been gradually carrying out an anti-poaching campaign and encouraging all relevant stakeholders to participate and supervise their land. With this, we hope to provide a deterrent effect from wildlife crime on the perpetrators. The campaign is being carried out continuously with various methods and layers to target different regions and a diversity of people to engage in parrot conservation.

As first step, in the past few months our campaign has worked with university- and high school students in Ambon city, Central Maluku. We had 78 participants from the Biology Department of Pattimura University and 112 students from two high schools in Ambon (68 female students, 40 male students, and 4 participants who did not mention their names and gender). We gave talks, delivered educative posters, and screened our documentary in Indonesian Bahasa language. This video is about our research and conservation program on Indonesian parrots, raising awareness about the issues of wildlife trade and encouraging viewers to make a change.

For the biology students at the university, we talked more in-depth about parrots, including topics of their ecology, morphology, and intelligence, distinguishing them from other bird species. We encouraged students to conduct research to monitor wild parrots populations in the Maluku region where there are many species with poor data. In addition, we conducted birdwatching activities with the students, teaching them to identify parrots at their campus, and talked about the importance of habitat conservation as well.

To measure the knowledge and understanding of high school students in parrot conservation, we carried out questionnaire activities. Our preliminary analysis shows that students did not know much about parrots living in their region (they were mainly familiar with cockatoos only), but after watching our documentary, most of the students considered it necessary to preserve parrots and their forests. These data will help us fine-tune our campaign, educative materials, and any videos we produce as part of this project.

Thank you very much for your continuous support towards this engaging work in Indonesia!