So I went up there and then a rather difficult trip with the help of the Chilean entomologists, Luis Pena, who had guided Peterson, I was able to get a small collection of James flamingos. The first ever, and to get them to feed and do well and I brought them back to the Bronx. This created a great deal of publicity with the Bolivians and in working with them, I was able to contribute to having Laguna Colorada and the province of La Paz made a reserve, which it is to this day. And it’s becoming, we now know it is the most important breeding space, but we also know that the James flamingo is not all that rare and that there is a population of at least 60,000. The result of all this was not only the exhibition and the new reserve in Bolivia, it was a survey that these psychological society sponsored went on for several years, where we brought in several ornithologists and we looked into the status of the populations of all six farms of flamingo, including those in Africa and Asia and so on, as well as the Latin American birds. Subsequently, we followed that up with a very major conference of Bolivians, Chileans, Argentines and Peruvians, which took place in Chile, which I helped set up and participated in. And this has resulted in a group now called the group for the conservation of flamingos and it’s a part of the flamingo specialist group, which is one of the many specialty groups in the IUCN. There’s now quite a group of Latin Americans working on the preservation of these birds, more reserves have been set up and as a result of our work pursuant to this, we were able to get the Chileans to set up a national flamingo reserve system.
