ALEX MITA meets the man whose private bird collection has become a park attracting thousands of visitors a week
A BIRD collector for 25 years, Chris Christoforou has found that what started out as a small park showing one man’s collection has, in recent years, evolved into a £3 million project with thousands of visitors every month.
The Paphos Bird Park, situated at Ayios Yeorgios in the outskirts of Paphos, boasts the third largest collection in Europe, but Christoforou said it is love rather than money that led him to amass such a cornucopia of birds.
Speaking to the Sunday Mail, Christoforou said the park was a way for him to share his passion for birds with other people.
“I started collecting birds from a very young age,” he said.
“I started with a small collection of birds and it just grew, so I thought why not build a bird park?”
“I’m not in it to make a profit all I want to do is show people my collection, and make it a very popular place to be.”
The park is an impressive collection of hundreds of species of and exotic birds from bald eagles to flamingos, parakeets and exotic macaws.
Apart from the birds, there’s also a herpetarium and seven types of deer as well as Shetland ponies.
Christoforou said the park was a wonderful way for people, and especially children, to get to know and touch animals they would never get near otherwise, in addition to providing an opportunity to learn about the birds, their habitat and how they live.
“We have had such a great interest from local schools and each day we get busloads of young children,” Christoforou said.
“We are planning to build an amphitheatre where children will be given an introduction to the park and to the species of birds and animals we have here and then they will be taken on a guided tour.”
Although an admirable idea, brining children into close proximity with the birds can sometimes be a bit difficult to implement. “Children are very keen to learn, but our problem is that they are not properly controlled by their teachers and we have to run around trying to stop them from throwing stones at the tortoises and chasing the birds around the park.”
Most of the birds are from Christoforou’s private collection and have been shipped here from the UK, the Philippines and Belgium, but Christoforou said getting the birds into Cyprus is a long process from start to finish.
“There are birds here that cost £3,000 each,” he said.
“The rarest are Papua New Guinea pigeons, there only a few left in the wild and we are hoping to breed them.
“It’s just so difficult importing the birds to this country,” he said.
“It’s such a long process, first they have to be tagged and microchipped, then quarantined.”
Christoforou said he also has to deal with the problem of finding the proper food for the birds.
“Most of the parrots and other birds are fed fresh fruit but we have to import food for the flamingoes from the UK.
“But because local fruit is not organic, they contain a lot of iron and many birds die because of that,” he said.
“So we have to import organic food from abroad and that obviously leads to other problems, for example we nearly ran out of flamingo food last month because it contained bone meal so it was kept in a container for weeks.”
But Christoforou said he was disappointed by not receiving any funding from the government especially for its conservation work with the birds.
“It costs a lot of money to run this place, and you would think that because we are safeguarding the future of some of the birds, the government would give us some form of funding, but they haven’t really been interested,” he said.
“Instead we face problems with the local municipality who obviously want to develop the land around the bird park and are giving us hell with boundaries and such.”
n Tickets to the park cost £9 for adults and £5 for children but special rates are given for families. For more information on the park call 26-945825.
