English
EspañolEnglish Translation of Senia’s Presentation
Hi. Good afternoon. My name is Senia Benitez. I’m going to tell you a little bit about the birding group I’m a part of in the east of El Salvador. I’m going to share a PowerPoint so we can show you the work we’re doing.
Can you see? Good.
I usually talk fast but will try to go a little slower so you can comprehend me better.
This is us. We are a group of people who started as bird aficionados. We formed a group called “Observadores de Aves de Oriente en El Salvador ” or Eastern El Salvador Birdwatchers. We specified El Salvador in our name to avoid any misunderstandings about us being from other Easts in the world, such as the Middle East or Far East.
How did our group come about? I really like to talk about it because this is the story of the invisible people and the invisible birds of eastern El Salvador. Really, we have been a little forgotten because we have a geographical division that is a long river, the river Lem. Just as the birds were forgotten, I was also forgotten in my childhood, and so this is a bit of our history, the history of the forgotten birds and the forgotten people I come from.
I am Senia Benitez. I’m a doctor specializing in nutrition, and I’ve always loved nature. I come from the rural area in the east of the country. I haven’t told Paso Pacifico this, but I was a refugee during the civil war for five years. Later through aid grants and scholarships I became a doctor at the University of El Salvador. Through all this, I always liked nature. I liked the countryside, going new places where the tourists don’t go, getting to know the corners.
This is my husband Jorge and my young son Jorge. They didn’t let me give him another name. We live in the east of the country, in the department of El Salvador. We live in San Miguel but the eastern part of El Salvador is made up of four departments. The Lempa River divides us from the rest of the country. We live in this region that is a bit far from the capitol and is also more unexplored.
This is our home. This is our Chaparrastique volcano and Olomega lake. No photo can do their beauty true justice.
I work in the medical field by profession. But at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, I started working from home and doing my job through telehealth. As a result, we decided to do more outdoor activities. In the process, we rediscovered our volcano. I aways considered myself a ‘daughter of the volcano,’ but I didn’t know it as much as I did during the pandemic. That was one positive outcome of the pandemic. Initially, we began by observing the birds, looking for animal footprints, and walking familiar and new paths. We also took photos with our cell phones.
We heard about a photo contest in El Salvador called “El Salvador and its people.” Its aim was to demonstrate the beauty of this country. Let’s be honest, I submitted 32 photos in the contest, but this was the one that won the most votes on social media. At first, we were told the prize was a dinner with an ambassador, but due to the pandemic, that was not possible. Therefore, they changed the prize to a Nikon D3500, which honestly changed our life. Though a dinner with an ambassador would have been nice, I’m sure that the camera had a much bigger impact on us.
What new opportunities did this camera give us? I had never had a professional camera before, and I wasn’t a professional photographer. I always loved nature but none of the photos I took were professional. This was a semiprofessional camera.
What new opportunities did it give us? It allowed us to get images of fauna that were in our environment. I would go on a walk and would see things, but never understood how beautiful they were. For example, this is a gray fox that we saw less than 300 meters from our house. I came to the realization that we were living in a beautiful environment.
After I started taking photos with this camera, I was able to upload photos and share them with other birding groups, which I wasn’t able to do before because of the photo quality. So having this camera really allowed us the opportunity to engage with two other birders in our region that we weren’t aware of before. These local birders were already well established and put us in contact with national and regional experts. And from there our interest grew. It started out with just me birding, then me and my husband, then me, my husband and my son. We love to go birding as a family. I take the photos, my husband records audio, and my son uploads pictures to the digital platforms.
Both of these birders, Ignacio Molina, a biology student, and Bany Alvarenga, a pediatrician, took us under their wing and helped us get in contact with experts. They adopted us as birders and introduced us to digital platforms.
As I said, they taught us to input data into digital platforms like eBird and iNaturalist. Through this experience, we learned more about the region, but especially that there wasn’t enough data on it. What was interesting was that our region has a beach, mountains, and other sights, and we still had the lowest recorded sightings despite other areas having less biodiverse ecosystems. There were other areas without beaches that had so many bird sightings recorded, which led us to realize that we were lacking birders and participation. Our area is so beautiful and yet, it was unexplored.
Another benefit from receiving the camera is the community began to recognize us as birders and nature lovers. We started engaging more with the community, and in turn, they began to recognize us as people that really care about birds. People would see me taking photos and stop us to ask what I was doing. I began to show people the biodiversity that was in our area.
This recognition as birders led to us receiving a phone call one day in 2021 from a local restaurant. They told us that they had found an emerald toucanet and needed our help. This toucan was turned in but unfortunately it didn’t survive after being treated at the clinic. But this discovery was what really changed our lives and marked the start of the real adventure!
As time went on, I became more involved in the birding scene and met with expert birders. I told them about how they had called me regarding the emerald toucanet and showed them the photo. Local expert Nestor Herrera told us that this specific bird was written about in a book by van Rossem in Birds of El Salvador, 1938. In this book, van Rossem writes that this is an endemic subspecies that only lived in the Chaparrastique volcano and Pacayal. I couldn’t believe it. Being from this region, I couldn’t understand how so much time had passed without me knowing about this endemic bird.
Nestor told us that since van Rossem, there had been no reported photos of this species on any platforms, including eBird and iNaturalist. These are specimens from van Rossem’s collection that are kept at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Additionally, van Rossem had written about two other birds that were endemic to Chaparrastique. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of them before.
As a result of this, I began talking to people. I’m not an expert birder but I do have good communication skills. So, I started asking people if they had seen the toucan. The entire world had seen the toucan. They were green, they were yellow, they were bright, they traveled in groups, and they were loud. But I had yet to see it and no one had captured a photo of it.
We started talking to local people, visiting farms and coffee plantations. We conducted at least 20 expeditions with two emerald toucan experts but didn’t find anything. Until one day, a local informed us that he found an emerald toucan in his yard. I followed him back to his house and there we found a toucan that had fallen and died the night before. Thanks to that sighting, we found a family of 3 emerald toucans. I was able to take photos and upload them to iNaturalist. Local experts have validated that those photos were in fact of the species that van Rossem had written about nearly 100 years ago. We donated the specimen to the Natural History Museum.
This is a photo of our precious bird. This toucan inspired the logo for our birding group.
After that discovery, we realized that we live in a very unexplored region with great biodiversity.
We also realized that each birder that we worked with came from different ecosystems. I lived near the volcano, another birder lived in the wetlands, and another birder comes from open pastures.
We decided to combine our photos and put them into a book where we explained how we were introduced to birding and how we met. Our dream is to print three books of each birder that tells the story of our individual ecosystems and our experiences.
After this we had the idea to form a group and make an official logo for ourselves. We decided it was time to bring awareness to the natural and beautiful richness we have in our areas, and the responsibility that comes with living in said areas.
We learned about Paso Pacifico and began to get involved with them. Paso Pacifico started supporting us and identified us as key birders of eastern El Salvador, which is where our work together began.
They provided technical support for the design of our logo and also gave us strength to come together as a group. Before, we were dispersed and didn’t communicate. Now, we are an official group and recognized by the country as a strong birding group.
Because of our collaboration with Paso Pacifico, this has given us visibility among other birding groups in the region. We have also begun to receive more inquiries about people who want to get involved. The experts of eBird and iNaturalist of Central America already know us. They write to us asking for reports and for updates on species in the area. Restaurants near the volcano also know our roles as birders. Recently, they called us to let us know that they had seen a pair of yellow-naped Amazon parrots. Two weeks ago, they let us know about two nests that had fallen from their trees. So having a logo and identity has given us a positive highlight in the community. We also gather all the birders and collaborate, whereas before we used to record sightings separately.
Another important point is that thanks to Paso Pacifico, we are able to work in regions outside of our own. With people from other regions, we are planning birding events so as to provide coverage for a majority of the regions.
In El Salvador, security can be an obstacle. It’s not as simple as me getting my camera and going wherever I want. It doesn’t work that way. That’s why it’s important we have community involvement to carry out our birding.
Now, I’m going to get into some of the activities that have been made possible because of Paso Pacifico’s support. Thanks to the logo and the reputation we have, we have received visits from scientists.
This was a visit we received on Global Big Day. They are biologists. One of them is an expert on raptor birds. They accompanied us to Jocotal lake.
We also had a French expert come to Pacayal volcano.
We’ve covered many ecosystems, this is one of our beaches. Fortunately, our country permits that right now you’re in the volcano, and 30, 40 minutes later you’re at the beach. Therefore in a single day we’re able to cover various ecosystems.
We’ve also done birding in San Miguel, which is on the way to San Juan lake. We’ve also gone to the Lenca mountains, which have a lot of pine trees in their forests. It is shared by El Salvador and Honduras. It has a completely different biodiversity than from where we live. Because my region has forests with native and deciduous trees, but the conifer trees we only find in these mountains.
What is our vision? Our vision is to make science and birding more visible in the community through photos, audio recordings and reports. Initially, because we were aficionados, when we made lists on eBird we received so many messages from people who didn’t believe we had seen what we saw. Because we weren’t biologists and we were relatively unknown, we didn’t have that much credibility.
We want to promote responsible birding so that the birds remain safe. We want to bring awareness to the fact that we live in an ecosystem with beautiful birds while also creating educational and outreach materials.
Our future is in birding, birding, birding. And making visible the results from our birding with lots of support. We need team support and we need energy, lots of energy because we all work. I work from Monday-Friday. My birding partner who is a pediatrician works from Monday-Saturday. We have families too so honestly we all make a really big effort to go out and document these birds.
Thanks to all of you for supporting this work. Thanks to Paso Pacifico’s support we are documenting birds from our region. Here are a few of the photos that you have made possible for us to capture in our region. When I first began birding on eBird in May of 2021, my department had around 290 bird species documented. We have input about 30 new species into this department’s eBird that weren’t registered before. All of those new species are backed up by evidence.
This is one of my favorites. It looks like Cleopatra. Thanks to Paso Pacifico and your support, we have the ability to put these photos together.
English Translation of Spanish Questions and Answers
Question 1: How did Sarah and Senia meet?
Sarah: Do you remember where or how you met me?
Senia: Yes. We met on social media. There are a lot of online birding groups in El Salvador. I started noticing that a ‘Sarah’ with a weird last name kept liking my posts. From there we kept making more contact and then one day we had a conversation over the phone. And that’s how we got to know each other.
Question 2: Do you feel safe birding in that zone?
Senia: Well, I am in the east because my family is from the east. So, I have my own understanding of what is and isn’t safe. The other thing is that I’m good at integrating myself into communities. So almost immediately I make good connections in the community. I also know of some places of interest to me where I cannot enter.
Question 3: Is it true that this region is important for raptors?
Senia: This question makes me excited! We would die for the raptors. We went out for my son. This is something everyone should see at least once in their lives. As a birding group, we have an end of week bird count. Regularly, we see the red-headed vulture, Mississippi Kite, hawks.
We see thousands, when I make raptor reports I could report 5,000, 10,000. On Global Big Day, they were spotted more documented more than 40,000 times.
Christine, do you wanna see photos or do you want to come to El Salvador? We have a city that we call “Mecca of the raptors.” It’s called Suchitoto and you’re bound to see thousands of raptor birds pass.
Question 4: Are the children in your area interested in birds and other wildlife?
Senia: Starting with my son who is 9 years old and goes out to bird. At nine years old he corrects me if I say a species wrong. With Paso Pacifico’s support, we are publishing a book about the birds of Chaparrastique from which we will pull a birding list. We’re hoping to do this before the October Global Big Day.
We plan to give one book to each school in Chaparrastique.