Yellow-eared Parrot: The Bird That Saved a Palm

A parrot tied to one tree

The Yellow-eared Parrot is a large, green Andean parrot with a broad yellow face patch and a heavy black bill. It is loud, sociable and hard to miss when a flock passes overhead.

It is also almost entirely dependent on a single tree: the Quindío wax palm, Colombia's national tree, which can grow over 50 metres tall and live for more than a century.

When the palms declined, the parrot declined with them. By 1999, a dedicated search across the Colombian Andes found just 81 birds.

Identification

Adults are around 42 cm long, mostly deep green with an olive-yellow belly and a long, pointed tail.

Key marks:

• Bright yellow patch running from above the eye across the ear coverts.

• Massive black bill, heavier than most parrots of similar size.

• Dark green wings with a yellowish wash on the underside in flight.

Flocks call constantly in flight — a rolling, nasal series of notes that carries across valleys and is usually the first sign of their presence.

Why the wax palm matters

Yellow-eared Parrots nest almost exclusively in cavities in tall wax palms, and they also roost and feed in them.

Wax palms had been declining for a specific reason. Young fronds were cut in enormous numbers each year for Palm Sunday celebrations, which stopped the next generation of palms from maturing. Meanwhile, adult palms left standing in cattle pasture slowly died without replacement.

The result was an ageing population of giant palms with no successors — and a parrot with a shrinking number of nest sites.

How the recovery happened

After the 1999 rediscovery of a viable flock in Roncesvalles, Tolima, Fundación ProAves built a campaign around three ideas.

1. Guard the nests. Field teams monitored nest palms directly through each breeding season.

2. Fix the palm supply. Thousands of wax palm seedlings were planted and fenced from cattle so they could actually reach maturity.

3. Change the tradition. Working with the Catholic Church in Colombia, the campaign promoted alternatives to wax palm fronds for Palm Sunday. Priests preached the message; communities adopted substitutes.

Artificial nest boxes filled the gap while young palms grew, and dedicated reserves were established at key sites.

The numbers

The population climbed steadily: from 81 birds in 1999 to several hundred within a decade, and past 4,000 by the early 2020s.

In 2021 the IUCN downlisted the species from Critically Endangered to Vulnerable — a rare direction of travel.

The parrot has also expanded back into areas it had abandoned, and in 2023 birds were recorded again in Ecuador, where the species had been considered extinct.

Behaviour and breeding

Yellow-eared Parrots are highly social. They roost communally in palms, sometimes in flocks of hundreds, and forage together on fruits, seeds and flowers of palms and montane trees.

Breeding runs mainly from January to July. Pairs use palm cavities, often with helpers from previous broods assisting at the nest — an unusual trait among parrots.

Clutches are typically three to four eggs. Chicks fledge after roughly nine weeks and stay with the family group for months.

What still threatens them

• Slow palm regeneration. Wax palms take decades to reach nesting size, so today's seedlings serve parrots that are not yet hatched.

• Cattle grazing. Livestock eat palm seedlings, which is why fencing matters as much as planting.

• Habitat fragmentation across the Andes, separating flocks into isolated groups.

• Climate pressure on montane cloud forest, which may shift where palms can grow at all.

Lessons other projects can copy

The Yellow-eared Parrot case is widely cited for a reason: it dealt with the actual mechanism of decline instead of the symptoms.

Guarding nests bought time. Planting palms addressed the long-term bottleneck. Changing Palm Sunday practice removed the annual harvest that prevented regeneration.

It also shows the value of working with cultural institutions rather than against them. The campaign succeeded because church leaders carried the message, not because of enforcement.

A comeback still in progress

The Yellow-eared Parrot went from 81 known birds to thousands within two decades. It is one of the clearest conservation wins in South America, and it happened because someone worked out that saving a parrot meant saving a palm.

Support ProAves reserves, visit the Cocora Valley and Andean birding lodges that fund this work, and share the story — it is one of the few genuinely good-news bird headlines of the century.