There were 56 wild, endangered Puerto Rican parrots living around El Yunque National Forest before Hurricane Maria in 2017. After the storm, there was only one survivor.
“I’ll admit that a couple of times I just cried,” said Tom White, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who’s been working for 30 years to re-establish a wild Puerto Rican parrot population at El Yunque.
The parrot is one of the most critically endangered birds in the world, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.
About 60 years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the parrot as an endangered species, a legal status that has resulted in a continuous and challenging effort to rebuild a healthy population of birds in the wild that continues today.
“If human beings have caused it, it is basically incumbent upon us to fix it,” White said.