What is it about?
We explore the dietary preferences of a community of c 15 parrots from the Peruvian Amazon to see if there are any links to a species predilection for eating soil from riverside claylicks. Although we expected parrots that eat more seeds to consume more soil due to the dietary toxin amelioration hypothesis, we did not find this. Instead we found that birds that prefer successional forest consumed clay more than expected.
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Why is it important?
Clay licks are important ecotourism sites, so understanding the species that visit, and why they visit is important to protecting the natural resources of this special place.
Perspectives
The effort in the field to collect the c1500 incidents of parrots eating things in the leafy green Amazon was quiet a challenge! Watching the birds at the claylicks was a pure pleasure, and a trip to a parrot or macaw claylick is something every birder and conservation biologist should experience at least once in their life-times.
Dr Alan Tristram Kenneth Lee
University of Cape Town
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Diet and Geophagy Across a Western Amazonian Parrot Assemblage, Biotropica, March 2014, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/btp.12099.
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