Battered by hurricanes, Dominica’s
national bird reclaims some old territory,
with a little help from its human friends

ONE MORNING early last December, Paul Reillo, a Florida biologist, and Stephen Durand and Randolph "Ronnie" Winston, rangers in the Forestry and Wildlife Division of Dominica, parked their Nissan four-wheel-drive truck at the end of a rocky trail on the south end of the tiny island and walked into the rainforest.

Forest rangers Stephen Durand and Randolph Winston and Paul Reillo, director of the Rare Species Conservatory Foundation, with Dominica's Morne Trois Piton National Park in the background.

For the next two hours the trio toiled up a sheer incline in intermittent rain, battling dense vegetation and soupy fog.

The hike up Morne Prosper, the near-vertical southern boundary of the Morne Trois Piton National Park, is one of the more grueling treks conservationists must make on Dominica (pronounced “DOM-in-NEE-ka”) to study wildlife. But this time Reillo, Durand and Winston didn’t mind. They had come to check out something big.

Earlier in the year, another Dominican ranger, Roy Paul, had returned from patrolling the area one day with a very encouraging piece of news.

Paul had heard the unmistakable call of a sisserou.

Missing since 1979
It was a gratifying development for Dominica and Reillo, director of the Rare Species Conservatory Foundation, a small nonprofit scientific organization based in Loxahatchee.

Dominica’s sisserou, or Imperial Amazon (Amazona imperialis), had not been seen in Morne Trois Piton National Park since 1979.

That year Hurricane David, the fiercest storm in the recorded history of Dominica, had scoured much of the park’s rainforest down to bare rock.

Biologists believed the storm left just 50 of the beautiful purple-breasted birds in existence, most living on the north half of the island on Morne Diablotin, the highest volcanic peak in the eastern Caribbean at 4,747 feet.

Reappearance in Morne Trois Piton would mean there was a larger number than thought of the sisserou, one of the rarest Amazon parrots in the world. Combined with the recovering northern population, there might be as many as 500 birds total.

There was only one nagging question.

As the heaviest Amazon parrot, with males weighing almost two pounds, the sisserou was a poor flyer, and it nested only in established rainforest.

With 20 miles separating the surviving sisserous on Morne Diablotin from Morne Trois Piton National Park, and little mature rainforest even after two decades, how had the sisserou managed to return?

A yodel and a trumpet blast
At 11 a.m., the hikers topped the ridge of Morne Prosper. They were in luck: It was a crystal-clear day on the other side.

After establishing their location using a GPS device, the men hunkered down to begin what was sure to be a long vigil.

The purple-breasted sisserou is the largest and perhaps most beautiful of the Amazon parrots.

Sisserous were secretive birds, almost impossible to track in Dominica’s steep, dense rainforests. They didn’t forage on the ground and if they felt threatened, they did not vocalize. You could stand under one in a tree all day and not know it was there until it flew away.

In their favor, the men were perched on a high ridge overlooking the park. Stretched out below them were 10 miles of deep, winding river valleys. With luck, they might see or at least hear one or two sisserous, if they sat quietly for a few hours.

It wouldn’t take that long.

Half an hour later, a familiar-looking green bird with short, rapid wing beats emerged from a towering chatagnier, a 200-foot-tall rainforest tree with a crown that resembles a head of broccoli.

Several more followed, and a sound Reillo describes as a cross between a yodel and a trumpet blast echoed across the valleys.

"There’s no parrot aficionado out there who has ever heard anything like it," he says of the sisserou’s odd, haunting call. "It sounds more like a song than a squawk, followed by a ‘weep, weep, weep, weep.’"

Reillo and the rangers spied four birds in all, and heard five. They looked at one another and smiled.

"We said, ‘This is really good news.’ When you take into account the physical exhaustion of getting to this location and the difficulty of identifying them, whenever you see that they’re doing well, you just sigh a big sigh of relief."

Some rainforest spared
The sisserou, which flies like a duck and needs a full-grown rainforest to survive, had returned to Morne Trois Piton. But how?

Apparently secondary forest had bridged the valleys over the years, allowing the bird to leapfrog from one small pocket of surviving trees to the next.

Reillo estimates there may have been as many as 20 sisserous in the area that day, and an unknown additional number in the 18,000 acres of Morne Trois Piton rainforest beyond. Dominica needs more time to re-explore the area.

The equally good news is proof that conservation works, says Reillo, whose organization specializes in assisting “governments that are already doing a fantastic job trying to protect their environment.”

"Dominica created Morne Trois Pitons National Park in 1975 and maintained it as an intact bioreserve. That enabled the sisserou to rebound there."

A northern park, too
January of 2001, just a month after the Morne Trois Piton National Park sighting, brought more good news for the sisserou.

After a two-year joint fund-raising campaign with Reillo, the Dominican government established a second national park, this one encompassing Morne Diablotin. Now the sisserou’s habitat would be protected in its northern stronghold, too, for a total of 25,000 national park acres.

Orange outlines show the locations of the small northern and renewed southern populations of the sisserou parrot on Dominica.

Ironically, the happy milestone threatened Reillo’s three-person, $150,000-a-year RSCF with extinction.

"We put everything on the line to create Morne Diablotin National Park," remembers Reillo, who donated his personal life savings to the cause. "We broke the mold when it comes to a nonprofit organization."

Close to bankruptcy last year, the RSCF has mostly recovered, says Reillo.

And he would do it again.

"The sisserou is a flagship species representing the last great oceanic rainforest in the Caribbean. It’s not important how many dollars come from which people. We are here to make sure that something tangible happens as often as we can make it happen."

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