Lilian’s Lovebirds (Agapornis lilianae) are restricted to valleys in the Zambezi basin and may number as few as 10,000 in the wild. The main threats to their survival include the loss of mature Mopane woodland habitat, persecution by farmers, capture for local and international wild bird trade and indiscriminate poisoning of waterholes used for drinking.

Since 2013, the WPT has supported fieldwork that has added new distributional records while uncovering range contractions in Zambia, identified multiple roost sites, sought to understand the birds’ habitat requirements and infer their current and historical distribution, revealed the importance of mature cathedral mopane woodland for the species, discovered that the birds’ populations have dwindled and demonstrated that the impact of cutting timber for charcoal and logging is more damaging to the birds’ forest than wildlife activities.

Collaborations with researchers are helping understand changes in the status of key habitat. Studies of nest box use in Malawi inform the widespread use of this approach for mitigating habitat loss. Waterholes vulnerable to pesticide poisoning are being protected through increased surveillance. Awareness and education planning and implementation have begun. New genetics work is determining the processes responsible for past-to-present geographic distributions of different lineages to understand their taxonomy, the effects of population fragmentation and climate change.