Believe it or not, someone has stolen the satellite tracking device right off the back of Karen the Hawksbill sea turtle. Our colleagues in Ostional are trying to recover it -- luckily the stolen device is trackable! Meanwhile, Karen is doing just fine. In fact, she nested last night at one of our beaches. Our rangers protected her and continue to protect her nest.
We got a brief mention in the local paper today! Ventura group tags rare sea turtle for study "The Ventura-based conservation group Paso Pacifico recently tagged a rare sea turtle off the coast of Nicaragua with a radio transmitter that allows scientists to study the endangered species."
Paso Pacifico is proud to announce that our rangers together with sea turtle scientists from the Proyecto Carey! have measured and tagged two critically endangered Hawksbill turtles. They were encountered and protected by our rangers on June 30th 2009 near the beach ‘La Flor’, a well known mass nesting olive ridley beach along the country’s southwest coast. These turtles will provide critical conservation information for what is one of the...
Paso Pacifíco board member, Rick Smith, has written a new piece for National Parks Traveler about the Hawksbills we're tracking: The rangers who discovered the two turtles kept them on the beach for two days, keeping their heads covered with wet towels and occasionally pouring water over their backs, so these unwitting reptilian volunteers could help scientists learn more about their dwindling species. During the second day, a turtle expert from...
Wetland for sale in southern Nicaragua for sale. We hope to buy it to set aside as a community-managed wildlife reserve area for the local people. If you are interested in contributing to a capital campaign to allow us to require land for biodiversity conservation, please visit our donation page or send an email: wendy(at)pasopacifico.org.
Last week, we visited the new La Conga Reserve in southern Nicaragua with landowner and cattle rancher Pedro Agurcia. Pictured are Agurcia, his daughter, one of his farmworkers, and Paso Pacifico board member Dr. Rodolfo Dirzo. In the background, you can catch a glimpse of the acreage he set aside for biodiversity conservation.
Kayak Guides in Ostional As the tourism sector grows in Nicaragua, nature tourism has the potential to provide economic benefit to local communities while also supporting conservation efforts. Paso Pacífico has joined with diverse partners to provide guide training and support business development. Beneficiary groups have included hostels and restaurants, all owned by members of the rural community. Young adults from rural villages have received extensive nature and kayak guide training,...
Karen heads out to sea Karen and Brasilia, the two Hawksbill turtles we tagged earlier this month, are getting good press, in part because Hawksbills are more commonly found in the Caribbean than in the Pacific. In fact, Karen is the first Hawksbill ever to be tagged on Nicaragua's Pacific coast. El Nuevo Diario: Dos tortugas marinas de la especie Carey, especie muy común en el Caribe, asombraron a un...
Our turtle rangers in Nicaragua affixed satellite transmitters to two Hawksbill turtles, Karen and Brasilia. You can follow their movement here: http://www.seaturtle.org/tracking/?project_id=295&dyn=1246546646
Schoolchildren from Ostional named this Hawksbill Brasilia A huge advancement for Hawksbill research in the eastern Pacific, Karen and Brasilia, are the first Hawksbills ever tagged on Nicaragua's Pacific coast. They will provide great tracking information in this extremely data deficient region. Stay tuned for information about how to track the turtles!
We have a hawksbill turtle at the beach where the rangers are and in the next 24 hours will be affixing a satellite transmitter to it to follow its movement across the eastern Pacific. More soon!
Published earlier this year, two economists published a paper in the BioOne Online Journal: The use of performance payments to achieve conservation outcomes is increasingly being used as an alternative to traditional regulatory and development-based approaches in low-income nations. Although payments are increasingly common in terrestrial species and ecosystem conservation initiatives, they are rare in marine conservation efforts such as sea turtle protection. This paper describes sea turtle incentive payment...
Drawing from "Fire in the Earth System," a literature review published in the April 24 Science, Solmaz Barazesh explains fire ecology in his article in this week's Science News, "Ecology, climate and human activities conspire to set the world on fire," July 4th, 2009; Vol.176 #1 (p. 26). Fire can shape landscapes, shift climate and even change processes such as the carbon cycle--blazes have impacted the planet for eons. But...
From humble origins, Salvador Sánchez, was elected as a community leader in the small fishing village of Ostional, near San Juan del Sur, became a conservationist, and is now a respected leader and successful entrepreneur. This is his story.(Adapted from the Spanish piece written by Adelayde Rivas Sotelo) Natural Leader Ostional is a small fishing community 24 kilometers south of the San Juan del Sur Harbor, in Rivas, Nicaragua's southwestern-most...
De origen humilde y trabajador, Salvador Sánchez, líder comunitario del pueblo pesquero de Ostional, en el municipio de San Juan del Sur, adaptó la filosofía de la conservación de los recursos naturales, hoy día no sólo es un respetado dirigente, también es un pequeño empresario de éxito. Esta es su historia.Por: Adelayde Rivas Sotelo LíDER POR NATURALEZA Ostional es un pueblo pesquero ubicado a 24 kilómetros al sur de la...
Zoom in on Nicaragua for an overview of our turtle project at seaturtle.org, an online directory of organizations involved in sea turtle research and conservation around the world.
Our neighbors, the Ojai-based RageJax Foundation has provided support for the ARBOLES para GAIA - Estrago Ecologico art exhibit opening in Managua next Friday. Paso Pacifico is providing several thousand trees to be given out at the exhibit, and each of the artists have created designs that will be on the bags in which the seedlings are placed. To check out the artists and their work, visit the exhibit's blog...
There should be a sign posted along beaches of the world during a certain season: “WARNING: Enter water at your own risk”. I’m not speaking of extreme undertow or heavy shore-break. Not water quality, or red tide concerns. Nor warnings against poisonous jellyfish. These are all important water safety concerns, but I am referring to something else, something almost as dangerous. I am talking about the distinctly unique experience of...
We recently hosted a mobile workshop organized by CATIE (the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center) and Conservation International to train people in the planning and management of protected areas. The group spent two weeks visiting protected areas in Costa Rica and Nicaragua and learning how to best tackle the challenges of planning and managing protected areas in a changing world. Paso Pacifico Country Director Liza Gonzalez showed our...
In honor of Save the Frogs Day, we'd like to introduce some of the frogs who live in Paso del Istmo, Nicaragua. The poison dart frog (Dendrobates pumilio) is a resident of the eastern edge of the Paso del Istmo biological corridor where we are restoring habitat from cattle pasture to humid tropical forest. It is listed as near threatened by the IUCN. The red-eyed tree frog (Agalychnis callidryas), which...
Local artists, businesses, municipal government, and students celebrated Earth Day with us this week. During the ceremony the mayor of San Juan del Sur committed the municipality to planting 50,000 trees as a contribution to the Meso-American Biological Corridor.
La Prensa reports on our reforestation program in Paso del Istmo (in Spanish). Paso Pacifico's national director is quoted: Esto se ha hecho en sólo tres años, son 450 hectáreas las que ya están reforestadas y la meta es reforestar cinco mil hectáreas en toda la zona y lo más importante es que se están plantando árboles que son nativos de estas tierras. In just three years, Liza explains, we've...
Over at SeedMagazine.com, there's a great discussion of the need to align economic incentives and biological imperatives. Problems could be averted if species had a value that was neither zero nor infinity, and if there were incentives for people to engage in environmental stewardship before a species becomes endangered. ... We can also use market mechanisms to transfer the actual value of environmental assets to stakeholders in a local community....
La Prensa has published a piece on our sea kayak training program (in Spanish), designed to promote eco-tourism in San Juan del Sur and Ostional. The goal of this program is to train young people to become eco-tourism guides, taking advantage of their region's natural beauty (and the kayaks we've furnished with the help of USAID) to launch their own micro-businesses and educate people about the mangroves and coastal ecosystems...
We're pleased to see that a small tourism business is offering a special package for our harbor clean up! For $20, guests will be provided transportation between Managua and San Juan del Sur, where they'll be served lunch and be able to participate in the clean up activities. This is just the indicator of success we love to see! A for-profit business is recognizing the value of our conservation work,...
We're getting ready for our first-ever harbor clean up in San Juan del Sur. Along with the usual coastline clean-up crews, we'll be working with teams of boaters and divers to pull up, haul away, and inventory inorganic waste on the bottom of the bay (presumably mostly abandoned nets and traps). Wokring with the Municipality of San Juan del Sur, the Reef Foundation, and San Juan del Sur CANTUR, we'll...
Julie Martinez, our environmental education instructor, has been working with elementary school kids in the Rivas province of Nicaragua. The kids are learning about the ecology of tropical dry forests, and starting to address environmental problems in their own community.
We are pleased to partner with Flora and Fauna International on a public awareness campaign to discourage the consumption of sea turtle eggs. We are surveying restaurants and market vendors, and asking them to commit to stop selling turtle eggs. We also visit schools to promote sea turtle protection.
We've officially launched our sea turtle program in the Rivas province, and La Prensa picked it up to share the story with the rest of Nicaragua. The campaign, designed to protect critically endangered sea turtles who nest on the beaches of Nicaragua, include environmental education, water conservation, eco-tourism, and local development. It also includes a sea turtle incentive payment program described by country director Liza González: Es un programa de...
Over at the Cantur San Juan del Sur blog, they're helping us gear up for Earth Day, by advertising our first ever Earth Day Forum. We'll be in San Juan del Sur, "a small place on this wonderful planet Earth, endowed with exceptional and endless beauty" April 22nd and 23rd, making it Nicaragua's Earth Day headquarters. The goal of the event is to celebrate the natural beauty of the region...
Our parrot video is now available in English!
Please watch our video addressing the issue of poaching parrots in Nicaragua. Once abundant in tropical forests, the Yellow-naped parrot (Lora Nuca Amarillo in Spanish) is increasingly rare in Nicaragua, where habitat destruction and poaching have reduced its numbers rapidly. Poachers are often young rural farmers who climb over 15 meters into trees or chop down trees to take parrot chicks out of their nests. Yellow-naped parrots only have one...
We're so pleased with the level of involvement at our community meeting in Ostional, where we have launched an initiative which includes environmental education, a sea turtle incentive payment program, and kayak guides to take eco-tourists through the mangroves.
The Ostional community guides spent the weekend at Las Galerias Mall in Managua to share their story and to promote Ostional as a tourism destination. Guided tours range from bird-watching hikes, to sea-kayaking trips. All guides (first four young women on the left) are young members of the local community. They are proud to know that they will benefit from ecological tourism.
January's Science roundup included interesting work on coral reefs: Compiling geological and biological data from fossils, a team of evolutionary scientists has found indications of the following: reefs are important evolutionary cradles independent of their preferred habitat in shallow, tropical environments in nonreefal ecosystems, shallow-water environments represent the most important evolutionary cradles Understanding reefs will help us understand populations of sea turtles and other marine wildlife as reefs face the...
Well, our first ever International Coastal Clean-up event in Nicaragua turned out to be a big success! We had over 1000 people picking up garbage at over 25 beaches across Nicaragua. This is the happy face of a job well done!
At Paso Pacifico, in addition to working with donors, government entities, and other NGOs, we also work with private landowners to foster cooperation and habitat-friendly farming and planting and land-use practices. Especially when working with home and hotel developers, we strongly encourage the use of native flora. We believe a healthy native plant population is one of the keys to saving many birds and other species from extinction. We understand...
We're thrilled to be featured at the Ecosystems Marketplace in a story about a project auditor with the Rainforest Alliance. Jeff Hayward: Quantifying Carbon, Communities, and More Last January, Hayward spent a week visiting a new project in southwestern Nicaragua. Here, large landowners graze cattle on their acreages while farmers hold on to smaller plots of land. At the same time, tourism is booming, with beachfront hotels luring both the...
Well, it has been many months since I established this blog and not a single post. Doing Conservation is very time consuming, and a blog for our organization always seems to go to the bottom of the priority list. One day we will have an amazing volunteer or intern to maintain our blog, or I will become more effective at time management and dedicate some time each week to blogging,...
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