哥伦比亚蜡棕如何从灭绝边缘挽救黄耳鹦哥
Deep in the cloud forests of Colombia’s Cocora Valley, hundreds of wax palms stand like giant pillars piercing the mist. These are the tallest palm trees in the world, some reaching up to 60 meters — roughly the height of a 20-story building. Covered in a thin layer of white wax, they give the foggy landscape an almost ghostly elegance. For centuries, the wax was scraped off to make candles, soap and even explosives, a practice that nearly erased the palms from the mountainside. Yet today, these towering trees have become the unlikely heroes of one of South America’s most dramatic conservation successes.
The yellow-eared parrot, a vivid green bird with a flash of gold behind the eye, is completely dependent on the wax palm. It nests only in the hollow trunks of dead or decaying palms and feeds on its oily fruit. By the late 1990s, fewer than 80 of these parrots remained in the wild, because the palm was being felled at an alarming rate and nesting sites had all but disappeared. Conservationists began to fear that the parrot’s quiet, croaking call might soon fall silent forever across the Andes.
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