How much are wild parrots studied?
Parrot behavior in the wild is hard to study because parrots live in remote areas, in very inaccessible jungles, and they’re hard to see through all the vegetation. Very few people have conducted long-term research, though there have been more studies in the last 10 years. The boom of research and information now is amazing, but there have very few studies of parrots lasting longer than 10 years. The most important project that I know of is from the University of California in Berkley by Steve Beissinger studying Forpus—little parrotlets in Venezuela. There are also a few studies in Australia on cockatoos, and that’s it for long-term studies. Most projects are for a single dissertation or thesis, based on very few years of work. But what we know from these studies is that parrots spend lots of days with their chicks after they’ve hatched. They may spend months after they’ve fledged feeding them, foraging for them, and taking care of them. It can be up to another year before large macaw
