Parrot Confidential (From a PBS Nature Production)

New Mexico State University professor Tim Wright, who studies the genetic relationship of parrots and vocalization, will appear in the PBS documentary titled “Parrot Confidential” that aired at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 13 on KRWG-TV. An associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ biology department, Wright served as a consultant and source on the project, filmed in Costa Rica earlier this year. The documentary about captive parrot welfare and wild parrot conservation was made by Emmy award-winning filmmaker Allison Argo.

Tim Wright and assistant Ivannia Sandoval prepare to climb a Guanacaste tree to inspect a Yellow-naped Amazon nest, while filming “Parrot Confidential.” 

“Dr. Wright added a critical voice to the film, grounding the domestic parrot stories with his scientific research in the wild,” Argo said in a press release about “Parrot Confidential.”

Official Bio:

 Timothy Wright is an Associate Professor in the Biology Department at New Mexico State University. He received his PhD from the University of California San Diego and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Maryland. He studies vocal communication and evolution in parrots using a combination of field and laboratory approaches. Parrots are renowned for their vocal mimicry abilities in captivity, but less is known about how learning is used in the wild. Thus parrots present exciting opportunities for understanding how learning shapes communication behavior, how learned vocal traditions evolve in natural and captive populations, and what neural mechanisms underlie vocal learning. In addition, he is active in the conservation of endangered parrot species in Costa Rica, Puerto Rico and Mexico, and has recently started work on a second group of birds with vocal learning, the hummingbirds. This research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Geographic Society, and the World Parrot Trust. His work on parrot conservation and vocal communication has been featured on National Public Radio, Science News, New Scientist and most recently in the PBS Nature documentary Parrot Confidential. He is an Editor for the journal Animal Behaviour, a panelist for the National Science Foundation, and a Fellow of the American Ornithologists Union.