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Captive Birds

I’m going to digress from the travelogue to highlight something I found disturbing throughout Peru. 

Women with Bird at Colca Canyon

Women with Bird at Colca Canyon

People had wild birds as pets.  I tried to find out from my various guides if the birds had been injured so that I should think of their caretakers as saviors, but they either didn’t know, ask, or seem to care.  Maybe it was a matter of communication, but I’m more inclined to think it was a real cultural difference in how we view wild things. 

Woman with Bird at Colca Canyon

Now to be fair, we have lots of birds in zoos that were never injured.  And in many locations we have people and places that take in injured birds, so that we city folks don’t have to figure out how to do it.

A Caged Bird on a Floating Island

A Caged Bird on a Floating Island

But, I would have liked to have been told that these birds could not support themselves in the wild, and that if these people had not adopted them, they would not be alive.
A Captive Bird on a Floating Island

A Captive Bird on a Floating Island

Without that knowledge, I’m led to believe these people captured these birds to entertain the tourists.  I prefer to see birds soaring overhead, sitting at my feeder, or singing away in the forest.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Birds, Journal Summer 2009, Peru. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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