Abstract
Dear Friends,
For more than two years, the African grey parrot has been our flag species and significant investment in infrastructure, capacity building and human resources were made to enable us to enhance the management of rescued individuals. The centre was upgraded to provide the best possible care to all rescued parrots and give them the best chance to be released back into the wild. It was a great achievement and a consecration after several years of efforts, to develop the reference national rescue, rehabilitation and release (3R) programme for the species in Cameroon. By doing so, the Limbe Wildlife Centre, with support from Pandrillus and several sponsors, became the only governmental institution in the country with the facilities, expertise and resources
to bring a positive change for the conservation of the species nationwide with regional and international impact. Out of the 395 parrots seized from illegal trafficking in 2019 and 2020, 236 survived (60%). Throughout 2020, we successfully transferred 215 individuals from quarantine to the large rehabilitation aviary (93% of survivors) and then 125 parrots (32% of total rescued individuals; 53% of the survivors) to the soft release aviary. All of them were successfully released back into the wild. Thanks to high standards procedures, we reduced the mortality rate at 40%, with the majority of the 159 dead individuals passing away during the first 3 weeks of quarantine, as a result of their poor condition upon arrival and the incredibly stressful events they went through since their capture (transport, overcrowding, rough handling etc).