The Philippine cockatoo or red-vented cockatoo (Cacatua haematuropygia), which is locally known as katala, wants to make a comeback not only in the lowland forests of Palawan but in the whole Philippines, particularly in areas it historically-occupied before its population collapsed in the 1960s.
Originally found on all major and hundreds of smaller islands within the Philippines, the population of the cockatoo, a very sociable bird and a favorite caged-pet because of its ability to mimic human sounds, disintegrated by the end of the last century mainly due to poaching and loss of lowland habitats.
To prevent the extermination of the remaining meager population, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) placed it in the list of “critically endangered” avian, and sought international help for its conservation and re-population.
By 1998, international support came and the Katala Foundation Inc. (KFI) was set up to implement dedicated projects for the conservation of the species in the framework of the Philippine Cockatoo Conservation Program (PCCP).
Currently, the KFI manages five project sites, four of which are in the province of Palawan, and one is situated in Polillo Islands within Oceanic Philippines.
In this province, there are two sites, one in Narra in southern Palawan on Rasa Island, and the other on Pandanan Island in Balabac. The densest sanctuary, however, is on Rasa Island, a small coral atoll surrounded by thick mangrove trees.
According to Indira Dayang Lacerna-Widmann, the chief operations officer of KFI, from a paltry 25 individuals (the term used when counting a sighted cockatoo in the habitat) they recorded on Rasa, the population of the cockatoo has increased to over 300.
However, despite the increase, Lacerna-Widmann said the cockatoos face new threats as they re-populate, such as saturation of the carrying capacity of Rasa, extreme drought which has almost made conservation suffer in 2005, random bird epidemic, and the plan to put up a coal-fired power plant in Panacan, Narra, where the birds now migrate in pursuit of more feeding opportunities.
“We are happy to announce that the cockatoos have re-populated successfully on Rasa. From merely 25 individuals, the conservation program has increased their population many folds. Nonetheless, they face new risks on the island and we, at KFI, want to address that as soon as possible,” Lacerna-Widmann told the Philippine News Agency.
She said extreme droughts experienced in 2005 and 2010 “already resulted in total failures of natural breeding attempts when the mangroves, where the birds roost, nest, and feed dried up.”
The KFI attempted to rescue and hand-raised the cockatoo hatchlings, and experimented on re-introducing them in a new habitat in El Nido on Laguen Island upon the request by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources-Protected Areas Wildlife Bureau (DENR-PAWB), but it was terminated due to human imprinting.
Human imprinting on wildlife means “associative learning in which an animal rapidly learns during a particular critical period to recognize an object, individual, or location in the absence of overt reward; distinguished from most other associative learning in that it is retained indefinitely, being difficult or impossible to reverse.”
Apparently, when the birds were re-introduced in El Nido, they immediately adapted to the place, but human imprints eventually set in. Soon enough, the cockatoos were already picking foods on the tables, and were even recorded knocking on the doors of the guests of El Nido Resorts.
Sidewise the termination of the project, Lacerna-Widmann said they discovered that the birds, though heavily imprinted, were able to acclimatize well to the conditions in the release site, including foraging for natural food and discriminative avoidance of terrestrial and aerial predators.
These findings led the KFI to wager on the opportunity and propose the project “Reintroduction of the Philippine Cockatoo” to sites it has occupied historically, such as Surigao del Norte, Surigao del Sur, Bohol, Leyte, Samar, Mindoro Oriental and Occidental, Masbate, Bukidnon and Romblon; and make Palawan province its “cradle of reintroduction and re-population.”
In early 2010, the first workshop on best practices for reintroduction was conducted with participants from concerned national government agencies, local governments and conservation non-government organizations (NGOs).
Technical backstopping during the preparation was sought from the IUCN Re-Introduction and Specialist Group, and main results were documented, which led to the identification of a quantitative tool for site selection and evaluation.
Lacerna-Widmann said the major component of the project, which will run for a year, is the assessment of initially two suitable sites for reintroduction and re-population of the cockatoo. For the first phase, the IUCN provided $ 25,000.
“Of the six sites we have studied and assessed, a site in Mindoro Occidental near the penal colony there appears to be appropriate for the reintroduction and re-population of the bird species,” she said. However, the KFI needs to conduct massive information and education awareness because encroachment has been found out to be the common problem. [PNA]
In reintroduction, she explained at least six cockatoos will have to be released in a site that has no existing cockatoo population to be able to accurately tract their progress. If they will be assimilated with those existing in the area, the project might fail due to incorrect data gathering.
In the meantime that the KFI is implementing the first phase of reintroduction, it has constructed in Narra an upgraded facility that can accommodate rescued cockatoos with minimum contact with humans and improved hand-raising protocols before they are released back on Rasa Island.
On the other hand, Lacerna-Widmann appealed to environment authorities in Palawan to reconsider the use of a coal-fired power plant to alleviate its energy woes. She said that until now, the DMCI Power Corporation has not conducted its Free and Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) in Narra, and many are still unaware how it will operate.
Panacan, where the power corporation is proposing to put up the coal-fired plant, is where the cockatoos rove and wander when they look for food. Emissions from burnt coal, she expressed, may harm the critically endangered species and cause its re-population to suffer.
Aside from the Philippine cockatoos, the habitat in Rasa is shared with other bird species, with some even endemic to Palawan, such as the imperial grey pigeon, the Mantanani scops owl, black-naped oriole, white-vented shama, racquet-tailed parrot, and rufous-tailed tailor bird.
“If they build a coal-fired power plant in Panacan, not only the cockatoos will be affected, all the other birds on Rasa will suffer,” Lacerna-Widmann said.
The KFI is funded by the Loro Parque Fundacion, North of England Zoological Society, Zoologische Gesellschaft fur Arten–und Populationsschutz, Conservation des Especes et des Populations Animales, with the DENR and the Palawan Council for Sustainable Development as partners.
