FLORIDA BIOLOGIST Paul Reillo 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.

Stephen Durand and Randolph Winston, forest rangers, 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 three men toiled up the steep 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 (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 exciting 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 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 one of the 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."

National treasure
The sisserou is one of two endemic parrots found on Dominica, a small independent nation that lies halfway between Puerto Rico and Trinidad.

The other, the Jaco (Amazona arausiaca), also endangered, is a smaller, greener Amazon that lives at lower elevations.

With its habitat limited to a total of 289 square miles, about the size of four times Washington, D.C., the sisserou at its height may have numbered two thousand birds. Some islanders hunted it for food until 1950.

But the sisserou has been lucky compared with other Caribbean parrots, says Reillo. Endemic Amazons on the neighboring French islands of Guadalupe, where a sisserou lookalike once lived, and Martinique were extinct by 1800.

The sisserou, whose name means parrot in the carib language, owes its survival so far to two things, says Reillo: Plenty of remaining habitat on Dominica--60 percent of the island is still covered in rainforest--and national devotion.

"You’ll find no greater sense of pride in a parrot than in Dominica," says Reillo. "It’s in the center of their flag."

Few but fast-growing chicks
On the downside, Dominica’s mountainous, spottily mapped terrain has thwarted close study of the sisserou. Tourists who hike the flat, mile-long Syndicate Nature Trail in the northern reserve can catch a glimpse of the bird easily enough if they’re patient. Getting close enough to learn the Amazon’s habits is another matter.

Helped by time-lapse video surveillance, biologists have determined the bird lives off shoots, buds and fruit from some 30 rainforest trees.

Reproduction is excruciatingly slow, with pairs appearing to raise one chick high in the rainforest trees every couple of years.

However, young sisserous mature extremely fast, says Reillo. He still marvels at a female sisserou rescued last year that at only eight weeks weighed 600 grams, close to its full size.

Once fledged, juveniles travel with their parents for up to a year, unusual behavior for an Amazon parrot, but a good tactic for ensuring the singleton baby's survival, says Reillo.

"Their strategy is to compress raising the chick in the nest, then teach it over a long juvenile period how to be successful in the wild. ‘Let’s get you big and fat and out of the nest.’"

With a sisserou pair now housed at the Parrot Conservation and Research Centre at the Botanical Gardens in the Dominican capital city of Roseau--a nine-year-old male joined by the one-year-old rescued female--captive breeding is a possibility, says Reillo.

"We’re hoping the disparity in age is just about right," he says, referring to most male parrots’ lag in sexual maturity.

Reillo also hopes that providing Dominican rangers with GPS equipment will make it easier to track and document both sisserou and jaco.

Last year, the U.S. government lifted selective availability, a protective error factor built into global positioning satellites to thwart hostile military action. Now it’s possible to pinpoint locations on Dominica to within three feet, instead of an eighth of a mile.

"Our goal is to get staff comfortable and able to describe what they see and where. Then bring that information back and load it into a computer database. They can describe topography and biological aspects--trees, how big they are, the distribution of wildlife, including insects. The goal is to build an archive of natural history information."

Storms on the horizon
Finding the sisserou back in its old stomping grounds of Morne Trois Piton National Park last year was reassuring.

However, it’s tempered by the reality that there is still much to do if the big Amazon is to survive, says Reillo.

Next on the agenda: research into additional areas that may be suitable as national park space, and a TV and radio blitz to promote environmental stewardship to Dominica’s population of 74,000.

Even with these efforts, another bad hurricane season could snuff out the sisserou once and for all.

"We’re engaged in a race against time," says Reillo. "Dominica could be clobbered by five storms in one year, we never know. And when storms aren’t a threat, then the parrots are more at risk from increased human encroachment."

He chuckles wryly. "Just when the hurricanes are letting up, that’s when the little human termites go to work, whittling away on their environment."

ParrotChronicles.com. Published Fall 2001.

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