George Olah
- Producer
- Additional Crew
- Camera and Electrical Department
![After years of preparation, zoologist George Olah finally got what he wanted. A special permission from the government of Peru. The 50+ page document gave him access to the Holy Grail of parrot researchers: the Candamo Basin, in the Peruvian Amazon. A place where wildlife exists without any human disturbance since the beginning of times. Surrounded by the foothills of the Andes, the Candamo Basin hosts one of the very few uninhabited tropical rainforest of the world. Not even native tribes had settled here and decades had passed since the last camera team dared to sail the hostile rapids of the Candamo river. In February, 2016 the nine members of an international scientific expedition finally got onboard of an Amazonian motorized canoe. It took 4 days for them to reach the location. After setting up their base camp in the rainforest, researchers climbed giant trees, investigated nest hollows, captured and tagged young macaws and collected blood samples and feathers for genetic analysis. But doing serious scientific work in the Amazon is not an easy feat. Jaguars visit the camp, wasps attack the climbers and parasites hunt and bite every free piece of skin. Despite all the challenges the team returns to the lab with the invaluable samples that can help us understand the status of an isolated parrot population.](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNDJkOTI2ZjMtZjk5Yy00ZGRhLTljMWMtZTAwMjJlMmY3ZGQyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXRyYW5zY29kZS13b3JrZmxvdw@@._V1_QL75_UX500_CR0,0,500,281_.jpg)
George Olah is a co-founder of Wildlife Messengers, a non-profit organization making scientific and educational films to promote nature conservation. George is also a scientist interested in evolutionary- and conservation genetics and tropical ecology. In 2006 he acquired an MSc degree in Applied Zoology at the University of Veterinary Sciences in Budapest, Hungary. He obtained extensive field experience on parrots in many Latin-American countries. In 2016 he gained a PhD degree at The Australian National University in ecology and conservation genetics. During his postdoctoral research he was involved in cutting-edge genomic analysis to investigate the genetic factors behind the decline of critically endangered bird species. He has been working for a decade in the Peruvian Amazon with local communities and ecotourism. He has produced several documentary movies about scientific research and conservation projects.