With regard to myself, in 2002 (I received RSG support over 2000 and 2001) I formally retired from the project (having founded and directed it for 10 years) and handed it over to new people at Armonía, the project implementing agency (partner of BirdLife International). The project now is flourishing with extensive funding from Loro Parque Fundación (Tenerife) and new macaw populations have finally been discovered, thus shifting the species that much further back from the brink of extinction. It remains however critically endangered, and the new folks on the project are hard at work implementing artificial nests and other measures to boost population levels.

Since leaving the project I have been working as a consultant ornithologist with the WildLife Conservation Society, focusing on their dry forest projects in the Bolivian Chaco, in the south of the country. Apart from actual research, this work involves ongoing training of local community members as ‘parabiologists’ – a term describing the professional activities of local people trained to engage in field enquiry, project design and management, presentation of results, etc. This is very exciting work and this year is especially important given that my wife, Erika Cuellar, is a 2007 Whitley Award winner precisely for a project to develop a field training course for these parabiologists in the Chaco region. I am busily preparing the instruction manuals for this course and will be one of the instructors.

Another current activity is that of producing awareness and educational materials on quite an intensive scale. I first started doing this for the BTM project, partly with RSG support, which required a significant educational component. I have developed the production of education materials using my natural ability to draw cartoons, and indeed this threatens to become my main conservation activity today! You can see the results at Cartoons For Conservation.