Nature, wildlife
Various non profit organizations promote education, rescue, rehabilitation and enrichment of parrots in captivity and strives to develop programs to protect endangered parrot species in their natural environment.
Project Bird Watch and the Indonesian Parrot Project to reintroduce Eco-MoluccaNuts for sale, in collaboration with Yayasan Wallacea (Wallacean Foundation, our colleagues in Indonesia).
These nuts from the Moluccas were largely forgotten when nutmeg and cloves became extremely valuable in the so-called “Spice Islands”. Now, the Eco-Molucca Nut has come back into prominence. It is our hope that the collection and sale of Eco-MoluccaNuts will create sustainable income to replace the non-sustainable trapping of birds. In Indonesia, that is called “ganti rugi”, which essentially means a win-win situation.
Eco-MoluccaNuts come from the kenari (Canarium)tree, a huge tree providing nest-sites for cockatoos, including the Salmon-crested or Seram cockatooas well as for certain parrots, and may even preventing landslides. They are a favored food of the Seram cockatoo, the Palm cockatoo and the Great-billed parrot. However, other birds cannot open their extremely hard shell.
The term Eco-MoluccaNuts includes both ‘kenari’ or ‘nanari’ nuts, the former being larger. It is not known why there are multiple sizes, since the same individual tree may bear two or three different sizes of nut. Kenari nuts may originally have derived from the Moluccas and from Sulawesi. There are many species of kenari throughout Southeast Asia , the Solomon Islands and the South Pacific Other names include pili nuts; nangai; Java almond; and ngali nuts.
On Seram island, there are at least 50-90 trees for each hectare of forest. But these numbers have markedly declined due to illegal and legal logging, leading to deforestation. In addition to Seram, this deforestation has occurred on neighboring islands such a Saparua, Haruku, Nusa Laut, Ambon and perhaps on the Halmahera in Northern Maluku. It probably has played a major role in the extinction of Salmon-crested cockatoos on the first two of these islands, since these huge trees provide many nest holes.