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How Conservation Helps Prevent Outbreaks

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Since the beginning of the pandemic, news outlets have reported on investigators’ efforts to pinpoint the “ground zero” of the COVID-19 virus. The question seemingly not under media scrutiny, however, is how we may be able to prevent such outbreaks of disease from occurring in the future. Although many think of vaccines as the best way to prevent disease, the best preventive medicine may in fact be maintaining tropical rainforest biodiversity and practicing forest conservation.

Deforestation and Wildlife Trafficking Spread Viral Diseases to Humans

As of 2021, zoonotic diseases—viruses that are transmissible from animals to humans—accounted for no less than 70% of emerging viral diseases. Such pathogens, some of which can spread to the point of pandemic, are chiefly spread by the following factors:

  • Destruction of tropical forests and lost habitats, which can drive wildlife into human-populated areas, increasing animal-human encounters
  • Lack of biodiversity caused by deforestation. This leads to the extinction of many species, and those that survive are more likely to be carriers of zoonotic diseases
  • Expansion of agricultural lands, particularly near human settlements, and livestock operations in these areas
  • Wildlife hunting and trade, which intensifies the frequency of animal-human contact, especially in unhygienic meat and animal markets
  • Rapid or poorly planned urbanization, which also results in lost wildlife habitats and drives animals into human-populated areas
  • Climate change, which causes wildlife to migrate in search of more hospitable habitats, bringing pathogens to new regions

Strategies for Protecting Tropical Forests and Preventing Disease Outbreaks

There are multiple strategies that can be taken to help prevent widespread viral infections. In low-income countries, one solution is to improve human health education and care systems in tandem with conservation education and efforts.

Another strategy is to monitor and reduce legal wildlife trade and eradicate illegal animal markets. Education can play a significant role as well: the more buyers are aware of how zoonotic diseases are spread, the weaker such markets may become.

Perhaps the most important step is to support policies that reduce deforestation and wildlife habitat loss. This is important both for existing intact forests and those that have become fragmented. Doing so can not only help prevent future pandemics, but slow climate change as well. 

Help Prevent Future Pandemics by Supporting Conservation Organizations  

At Paso Pacífico, our mission is to create wildlife corridors that safeguard biodiversity while connecting people to their land and ocean. Our goal is to restore and conserve Mesoamerica’s Pacific Slope ecosystems. The threatened mangrove wetlands, dry tropical forests, and eastern Pacific coral reefs are among these ecosystems.

All conservation programs at Paso Pacífico benefit directly from your donations. These include education programs that teach children the principles of biology, ecology, and environmental citizenship. Contact us today!   

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The Pacific leatherback sea turtle has survived since the dinosaur age—and as the largest turtle species, this reptile is a giant in its own right. Yet today, these turtles are in imminent danger of extinction, in part because of declining numbers of viable nests. In Indonesia, which is the primary nesting habitat for the Western Pacific leatherback sea turtles, numbers have dropped by over 80%. In Mexico and Central America, the main sea turtle nesting grounds for their Eastern Pacific counterparts, the decline is over 90%. 

These turtles are vulnerable along their migration routes throughout the Pacific Ocean and coastal habitats in the Americas. Today, the greatest threats to the leatherback sea turtle population as a whole include:

  • Fishing (including intentional and unintentional catches; the latter is called bycatch)
  • General loss of habitat to coastal development and resource extraction
  • Poaching
  • Collisions with boats
  • Pollution and climate change

Mothers and hatchlings face additional hazards during sea turtle nesting season:

  • Human predation (for turtle meat and eggs, considered a delicacy in Central America)
  • Poaching (selling turtle eggs into the illegal wildlife trade)
  • Predation by native and non-native animal species
  • Hatchling disorientation by beachfront lighting in populated areas
  • Loss of nesting habitat to coastal development and resource extraction

Strategies for Protecting Pacific Leatherback Sea Turtles

Although Pacific leatherback sea turtles are legally protected in the US, Mexico, and some Central American countries, many threats to the species require additional effort to eliminate. The following strategies can aid significantly in bringing this species back from the brink of extinction. 

Governments, companies, and other organizations can do the following:

  • Work with domestic and international partners to ensure compliance with conservation laws
  • Reduce waste and pollution in the Pacific ocean and coastal lands
  • Develop new fishing gear technology to help prevent sea turtle bycatch
  • Create legal and best practice policies for protecting sea turtles (such as creating coastal ordinances that reduce boat collisions, light pollution, and nest disturbance)
  • Educate the public about sea turtle conservation

Individuals can do the following:

  • Reduce waste and trash in the ocean; consider volunteering for beach cleanups
  • Keep your distance from sea turtles; don’t approach them, feed them, or disturb their nests
  • Report marine life in distress
  • Vote for political policies and candidates that support marine conservation efforts

Help Save Pacific Leatherback Sea Turtles with Paso Pacífico

An excellent way to help save endangered species like Pacific leatherback sea turtles is to support conservation organizations. Paso Pacífico is accomplishing important steps in protecting these ancient giants. 

At Paso Pacífico, our mission is to create wildlife corridors that safeguard biodiversity while connecting people to their land and ocean. Our goal is to restore and conserve Mesoamerica’s Pacific Slope ecosystems. The threatened mangrove wetlands, dry tropical forests, and eastern Pacific coral reefs are among these ecosystems.

All conservation programs at Paso Pacífico benefit directly from your donations. These include education programs that teach children the principles of biology, ecology, and environmental citizenship.

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By Jason G. Goldman

Biologist Miguel Ordeñana crouches down in the shade of a forest and reaches into his pack for a small bottle. He sprays the substance on a tree just a few feet above the ground. A few meters away behind him is a camera trap he’s deployed. The liquid he’s spraying is a cologne called Calvin Klein Obsession for Men and if he’s lucky, the scent will convince a jaguar to stop and sniff it long enough for the camera to snap a photo or two.

Nobody knows why this particular aroma is enticing to the big cats. It could be the vanilla extract, or it could be the civetone, a synthetic chemical meant to mimic the excretions of a small nocturnal cat-like mammal native to the Asian and African tropics. Either way, jaguars go nuts for the stuff.

That was a few years ago, and Ordeñana, a wildlife biologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles who was then collaborating with Paso Pacífico, did get lucky. While locals had reported seeing jaguars in the region, this was the first time they were formally documented by scientists. In the years since, the spotted cats have made their presence known in the Paso del Istmo region, a corridor of land sandwiched between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific Ocean.

Male jaguar in the Paso del Istmo, Nicaragua, April 2014

A male jaguar pads along a trail in the Paso del Istmo, Nicaragua, in April 2014.

These cats are something of an anomaly. “We know that jaguars have dipped their toes into the Paso del Istmo,” says Paso Pacífico executive director Sarah Otterstrom, “but they’re pretty much gone from western Nicaragua, which is a pretty large area. And they’re gone from El Salvador and they’re probably gone from western Honduras.” In other words, the big cats have been driven out of almost the entire Pacific dry forest of Central America.

The region’s other big cat has suffered a similar, if less precipitous, decline. The puma, also known as the mountain lion, cougar, panther, ghost cat, catamount, and almost forty other common names in different areas, has the widest range of any modern large cat, stretching from the Northern Yukon all the way to the southernmost reaches of Patagonia. And while a single puma was photographed with a camera trap last year in El Salvador, and a second one recently turned up dead, shot by hunters, that species is likewise only rarely seen in western Central America.

It’s certainly not unusual for large cats to be extirpated from parts of their range, or to go extinct entirely. The jaguar is largely extirpated from the United States, for example, besides the odd sighting in Arizona. And the cougar has disappeared entirely from the U.S. east of the continental divide, save for a small population hanging on in Florida. But Central America is home to the Mesoamerican Biodiversity Hotspot, a region that has both a high rate of endemism (species found there and nowhere else) and a high rate of habitat loss. It contains the third largest forested area in the world and is a vital linkage between the ecosystems of North and South America.

Two pumas stroll past a camera trap in the Paso del Istmo, Nicaragua, in January 2020.

Two pumas stroll past a camera trap in the Paso del Istmo, Nicaragua, in January 2020.

As agriculture and urban development have expanded, large mammals like jaguars and pumas have lost habitats that are vital to their survival and movement, but habitat loss alone doesn’t account for the cats’ plummeting populations. Add revenge killings, when ranchers kill predators due to real or imagined threats to their livestock, and the global trade in wildlife parts, and you have a recipe for extinction.

It’s due to the habitat concerns, in part, that many big cat conservation projects have historically focused on the more intact forests of eastern Central America rather than the more heavily populated and more intensively altered regions closer to the Pacific Ocean. But maintaining or restoring habitat doesn’t, by itself, solve the anthropogenic problems. That’s why Paso Pacífico has dedicated its efforts towards coexistence.

“Paso Pacífico disagrees with the idea of ignoring the importance of major predators in human-dominated ecosystems. We think that you still need these major predators on these landscapes,” says Otterstrom. “You need them to be able to survive at some level.”

That’s because the carnivores at the top of the food chain, also known as apex predators, help to regulate the rest of the ecosystem. Free from the pressure exerted by large predators, medium-sized carnivores like coyotes, foxes, and ocelots (also called mesopredators) would see their populations go through the roof. But as a result, their prey base – the small mammals, like rabbits and rodents – would decline. Populations of the largest herbivores, like deer, tapirs, and peccaries, would expand because their own predators would be missing. If those animals over-grazed the plants they eat, it could have impacts on everything from insect communities to carbon sequestration to hydrology. In other words, the entire system would go sideways in an ecological process called a trophic cascade.

One need only look at mega-cities like Los Angeles or Mumbai to understand that large predators like mountain lions and leopards, respectively, can co-exist alongside human communities – as long as they are protected from being shot, run over, or poisoned. If cats such as these can make it in two of the most heavily urbanized landscapes on the planet, surely there is a place for jaguars and pumas in western Central America.

Making space for predators in these regions requires re-imagining what suitable habitat looks like. “As we restore areas, the cats come back,” says Otterstrom, adding that as predator conservation efforts succeed, resources will need to be marshaled for addressing the human-wildlife conflicts that will inevitably follow.

To start with, people should probably avoid spraying themselves with Calvin Klein Obsession for Men when out in the woods.

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By Jason G. Goldman

The writing was on the wall more than a decade ago, or at least it seemed to be. Though the species was classified as one of “least concern” by the IUCN, yellow-naped amazon parrots were struggling in the Paso del Istmo region of Nicaragua. The green-feathered birds sport patches of red on their wingtips and are named for the yellow on top of their necks. A 2008 survey in the department of Rivas found that ninety percent of the parrots’ nests failed. Their nesting trees were being chopped for firewood and timber. Their nestlings were succumbing to Africanized bees and to predators. Most of all, the chicks were being stolen out of their nests by people looking to sell them into a pet trade with an extraordinarily high demand for the chatty species.

The species, which ranges on the Pacific slope of Central America from southern Mexico to Costa Rica, and on the Caribbean slopes of Honduras and Nicaragua, was reclassified as “vulnerable” in 2012, and then as “endangered” just five years later. Meanwhile, thanks to the hard work of Paso Pacífico biologists and the dedication of a small group of landowners, the population in Rivas is rebounding.

That change has come about one landowner at a time. If a nest is found on a farmer’s property – and they agree to protect it – they’re paid a small fee. They’re paid again to allow biologists to periodically monitor the health and development of the chicks, and again if the birds successfully fledge. The cash incentives add up to slightly more than $200 per nest altogether. In recent years, more than a dozen landowners have participated in the program.

Incentives like these are intended to shift local communities’ perspective of these animals from a commodity to be traded to a resource worth protecting, to promote the notion that animals are worth more in the wild than in cages. In addition to the inducement offered by cold, hard cash, a more robust parrot population offers an opportunity for communities to generate revenue indirectly through ecotourism and birdwatching.

If successful, then after enough years of cash payouts, community members would come to value the presence of the birds on the landscape in a more abstracted manner. That, in turn, would enable conservationists to redirect scarce funds towards other conservation efforts.

Paso Pacífico executive director Sarah Otterstrom believes that this transition has already begun in Rivas, though the need for cash-based incentives has not yet faded. “We have gotten a good amount of community members expressing their happiness and joy to hear and see parrots again,” she says, adding that Paso Pacífico’s Junior Ranger program, now in its twelfth year, likely has an impact on attitudes as well. Many of the earliest participants, now entering adulthood, are likely uninterested in pursuing the parrot trade.

The program’s impacts can be seen even by an untrained observer. “When we started we couldn’t find any roosts, and now we have roosts with over one hundred birds in them at a time. The social behavior of the parrots on the landscape has changed,” says Otterstrom. “We have really effectively reversed declines of the yellow-naped amazon parrot in Rivas.”

Having proven an effective strategy for avian conservation, Paso Pacífico has begun to replicate it in Cosigüina, near the Gulf of Fonseca in northwestern Nicaragua. That’s where the last remaining population of wild cyanoptera scarlet macaws on Central America’s Pacific coast can be found. This unique subspecies is nearly extinct in the wild, but if landowners there can be motivated to protect the macaw nests, just as their counterparts have protected yellow-naped amazon nests in Rivas, they might just have a fighting chance.

3 yellow-naped amazon parrots in flight. Photo by Orlando Jarquin.

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By Jason G. Goldman

The world lurched to a standstill in the spring of 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic infiltrated nearly every corner of the planet. But while our daily lives slowed and changed, the rest of the natural world kept plodding on, almost oblivious to the fear and angst gripping human communities. Spending all that time at home, many people began looking out their windows or going on long walks in their neighborhoods and noticing, some for the very first time, the plants and animals that have quietly found a way to survive alongside us in big cities.

Perhaps that explains why a gentleman living in San Salvador began photographing the birds flying by his ninth-story condominium. Because of its work elsewhere in El Salvador, Paso Pacífico has been featured in local news quite a bit, so the man thought to reach out to the organization about the birds he had been watching.

They turned out to be yellow-naped amazon parrots, the same endangered species that Paso Pacífico was hard at work restoring in southern Nicaragua. When Paso Pacífico biologists began looking, they counted more than eighty parrots, including two roosts of at least thirty birds each. In order to protect the birds, which can fetch high prices on the black market for the pet trade, Paso Pacífico is not revealing the roosts’ specific locations. Still, their behavior suggests that these birds do not hesitate gathering in busy, crowded areas, near heavily trafficked roads – as long as there are trees with dense foliage where they can go relatively unnoticed.

The researchers suspect that the reason the parrots have gone undetected until now is because they remain active at night, when people are indoors and asleep. By the time the sun rises, most of the birds have moved on to other spots in the city, with only a few stragglers left at the roost sites.

It’s not actually all that surprising that the species has found a way to persist in the big city. Several years ago, a team of Mexican and American researchers observed yellow-naped amazons at two different sites in Costa Rica. They found that the parrots were equally able to thrive in ranchland, where natural vegetation is more widely distributed, as on farmland, where the little remaining natural areas are more densely clustered in small habitat patches.

Despite being members of the same species, the two groups of parrots – separated by just thirty kilometers – employed different strategies for establishing territories, selecting suitable habitats, and roosting. Even more impressive was what happened when the researchers translocated parrots between the two sites. Despite having been raised on ranchland, the parrots released on farmland quickly took on the survival strategies of those who had always lived there. That was also true for those parrots captured on the farm and released later in the ranching area.

In other words, yellow-naped amazons turn out to be remarkably malleable, able to rapidly adjust to a wide variety of different conditions – including, as the birds of San Salvador have shown, to heavily urbanized areas.

The birds’ numbers may be dwindling throughout their range, but they have apparently found a way to survive in some of the most intensely disturbed habitats in El Salvador. Indeed, these urban flocks might well comprise the largest population of yellow-naped amazons in the whole country. “The hope for the yellow-naped amazon parrot in El Salvador comes from the city,” says Paso Pacífico executive director Dr. Sarah Otterstrom.

2 yellow-naped amazons perched against a gray stone wall. Photo by Carlos Jenkins. Two yellow-naped amazon parrots fly over a roof with foliage in the background. Photo by Carlos Jenkins. Low light - 3 perched yellow-naped amazon parrots, photo by Carlos Jenkins
Parrot photos: Carlos Jenkins.

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By Jason G. Goldman

This is the first article in a three-part series on connectivity.

It was the first of March, 1872, when President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act into law. With his signature, the nation’s first national park was officially born. It’s hard to say exactly where the idea for a national park came from, but the origins of Yellowstone seem to lie in the Golden State, several thousand miles to the west. Eight years earlier – well before it became a national park itself – Congress granted the Yosemite Valley and surrounding areas to the State of California, with a mandate to manage them as a public park.

Yellowstone and Yosemite were far from the first attempts by human communities, whether indigenous and colonizing, to grant special status to certain landscapes. Still, in the nearly one hundred fifty years since the first “crown jewel” of America was established, the idea has spread across the globe. The writer Wallace Stegner called national parks “the best idea we ever had,” and the concept has perhaps become one of America’s most influential cultural exports. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), today there are more than three thousand national parks scattered across more than 180 countries.

National Parks are only a small slice of the protected area pie. There are more than 12,000 public and private parks and preserves on the planet, encompassing some 15% of the planet’s surface (not including Antarctica), though the level of protection afforded to the wildlife and the habitats within them certainly varies widely – as does the primacy of biodiversity in the first place.

Indeed, a 2017 analysis found that while biodiversity protection was a top stated priority in land conservation agendas across the globe, it has only a minor influence on which areas are set aside for protection in practice. Instead, areas that were isolated, lightly populated, had little agricultural value, or had high tourism value were more likely to be set aside than were areas that were notably high in biodiversity or habitat richness.

But even where biodiversity is well represented within protected areas, the reality is that nature does not lend itself to confinement. This so-called fortress conservation approach to biodiversity protection – animals live here, and people live there – ignores the fact that ecosystems can only remain functional if organisms, along with the materials, energy, nutrients, and information they carry with them, can move across the landscape. And while there are fenced areas large enough to enclose authentic ecological processes – South Africa’s Kruger National Park is one notable example – they are few and far between. In most places, another solution is needed.

Connected Canopies

Like other dry forests of Central America, Nicaragua’s Paso del Istmo region, also known as the Rivas Isthmus, was first colonized at least four hundred years ago. Centuries of human pressure have resulted in patchwork quilt of habitat types: developed towns and villages scattered across a mosaic of farmland and natural forested areas. Some estimates suggest that less than 0.1% of the original old growth Mesoamerican dry forest remains intact.

It was once thought that spider monkeys by virtue of their arboreal lifestyle, required extensive closed-canopy forests to survive. Yet despite this dramatic loss of habitat, spider monkeys have persisted alongside human communities in the Paso del Istmo. While the monkeys – there are species all in the genus Ateles – are widespread through Central and South America, the black-handed spider monkey Ateles geoffroyi was re-listed as endangered in 2008 because they continue to suffer not just from habitat loss, but from hunting and from capture for the international pet trade.

These spider monkeys will not be saved by a National Park. The Paso del Istmo is home to more than 165,000 people; it can’t be simply walled off for wildlife. Instead, humans and monkeys alike must find a way to share the landscape.

A Global Challenge

Elephants illustrate the problem in a slightly different way. In Kenya and Tanzania, males can maintain territories of up to some seven thousand square kilometers, an area more than twice the size of Rhode Island. And since elephants migrate seasonally following the availability of fresh water, they total area they rely on over the course of a year can be quite a bit larger. Even if they spend lots of time within protected areas, they also must move between them, through farmland and even through villages. And that’s where elephants get into trouble. They raid crops, they siphon water from community wells, and they even kill people. Sometimes, they get shot or poisoned for doing so.

The need for coexistence with large, charismatic, and sometimes dangerous wildlife even occurs in some of the most densely populated, wealthiest cities on the planet. The second leading cause of mortality for male mountain lions in Los Angeles is being hit by cars zipping down the nation’s most crowded highways. (The first is being killed by other males, which is appropriate for the cats.) High-speed roadways cut each group of lions off from the others onto islands of habitat surrounded by oceans of asphalt and traffic. The habitat patches they do have are relatively high quality but that doesn’t matter if the most courageous lions are reduced to roadkill while their more risk-averse kin suffer from the biological defects that follow from inbreeding.

Researchers warn that unless something is done, pumas will spin down an “extinction vortex” and disappear from the only mega-city in North America in which large cats have so far made a home. It could happen in fifteen years.

Similar stories can be told about jaguars, parrots, peccaries, raptors, and more. Even snakes and turtles and butterflies attempting to cross narrow dirt roads can suffer if they can’t do it without being killed by passing motorists. In other words, protecting even quite large areas of high quality habitat is insufficient to address the looming biodiversity crisis. Animals must be able to safely move about, even after leaving the sanctuary of formal protection. In almost every ecosystem on the planet, humans must find a way to make space for wildlife: physical space, yes, but also psychological.

Click here to read part two: “Building Bridges – Literally” and click here to read part three: “Making Way for Monkeys.”

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By Jason G. Goldman

Every year, millions of birds of prey migrate from summertime breeding grounds in North America to overwintering grounds in South America. One section of their pathway stretches nearly 2500 miles between central Texas and northwestern Colombia’s Chocó rainforests and is known as the Mesoamerican Land Corridor. More than five million raptors – the family of birds that includes vultures, hawks, eagles, and owls – can be seen making the journey each year. It’s the most important flyway for raptors in the Americas.

More than one million of them pass through a narrow stretch of southern Nicaragua, bounded on the west by Lago Cocibolca and on the east by Reserva Biológica Indio Maíz. That’s according to a survey conducted in 2019 on behalf of Paso Pacífico in San Miguelito. Over just twenty-three days of monitoring, biologists counted more than 1.2 million raptors passing overhead. Just over eight hundred thousand of them were turkey vultures. Also abundant were Swainson’s hawks and broad-winged hawks. In all, they documented sixteen different types of raptors.

Swainson’s hawk, cropped, by Tucker Hammerstrom on Flickr. Used under CC BY-ND 2.0

The importance of this region for raptors has been known since at least the year 1555, when a Spanish colonialist named Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés wrote about the seasonal movements of large flocks of raptors through eastern Panama. Nearly five hundred years later, there’s still a lot left for avian biologists to learn – especially about the section of the flyway that passes through Nicaragua.

With strict coronavirus protocols in place, the Paso Pacífico team returned to San Miguelito this year to repeat the raptor count. The effort has been extended from one to two months. Halfway through the study, the team reported early results: they again counted more than 1.2 million raptors in the first month of monitoring. As before, the most common species were turkey vultures, Swainson’s hawks, and broad-winged hawks.

Part of the 2020 raptor team, photo by Oswaldo Saballos.

“Everybody knew that the raptors were passing through Nicaragua,” says Sarah Otterstrom, executive director of Paso Pacífico. “It’s not like they’re disappearing between where they’re counted in Belize and where they’re counted again in Costa Rica and Panama,” she explains. But nobody had ever bothered to identify exactly how they are using Nicaraguan airspace, or what habitats they rely on as stopover sites.

That’s why Paso Pacífico intends to construct a permanent raptor monitoring station in the area. After completion, it will join a network of more than a dozen similar sites along the Mesoamerican Land Corridor that, together, will paint a complete picture of raptor movements in the Americas.

The station will be named in honor of Luis Fernando Díaz Chávez, a Paso Pacífico bird technician who pioneered the first year of the raptor monitoring study at San Miguelito. He died in June after spending nearly a month in and out of the hospital with COVID-19.

Luis Díaz Chávez during the 2019 raptor monitoring, photo by Marlon Sotelo.

Just thirty-one years old, Luis had been a regular contractor on Paso Pacífico’s bird projects for the last nine years. “He really loved raptors,” says Otterstrom. “He had written a draft of a Raptors of Nicaragua book, with his own photography, that we are trying to finish and publish for him.”

Luis came from a big family in Managua, where he shared a home with his parents, his grandparents, his brother, and many aunts, uncles, and cousins. Though his family did not have many financial resources, they helped him become first in his family to graduate college.

After his father died several years ago, Luis became a high school science teacher. The career move meant a more predictable salary than jumping from project to project as a bird technician for Paso Pacífico. “Luis would send most of his payments to his mother,” explains his colleague Oswaldo Saballos, who counted Luis as a friend and as a mentor. Anything left over would be spent on birding guides or other tools to fuel his passion.

Despite his full-time employment as a teacher, Luis still found time to lend his ornithological talents to Paso Pacífico when he could. Over the years, he taught more than five hundred children to observe birds. “He was one of the best birders in the country,” recalls Otterstrom, especially when it came to identifying birds based only on their songs and calls. “I think that his gentle, shy, quiet personality gave him this really supernatural ability to observe and perceive nature,” she says.

After the raptor monitoring station in Luis’s honor is completed, Otterstrom hopes it will attract birdwatchers and other tourists passionate about wildlife and nature. Local communities could therefore leverage the ecological value of the region for economic gain. “This area is where the Nicaraguan government wanted to run the canal. While that project is no longer a threat, it’s important for conservationists to put this space on the map in terms of its ecological value and importance,” she says. “We need to make sure we protect these migratory corridors for raptors and other wildlife.”

Panorama of the 2019 initial monitoring station located in Rivas, Nicaragua, photo by Vincent Romera.

Top photo: Turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) spotted during the 2019 raptor monitoring, photo by Vincent Romera

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Maestras de educación ambiental participaron en el Big Day (conteo de aves migratorias y residentes) éste sábado 09 de mayo 2020.

Environmental education teachers participated in Global Big Day (bird count of migratory and resident birds) this Saturday, May 9, 2020.

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Earth Day turns 50 this year. In its honor, we invite you to make a gift supporting education for 93 children in Nicaragua. From April 20-24, your gifts under $500 will be matched at 50% by Global Giving!

Our Junior Ranger program helps children ages 8-13 learn how to save nature this year in the rural areas where they live. Nicaragua’s amazing biodiversity and landscapes have been significantly damaged, and these children are the key to positive change. Since 2012, our Junior Ranger program has instilled the passion and knowledge they need to safeguard conservation gains and strengthen their communities for life. We invite you to make it happen for 93 more kids this year! Note: This program is continuing at a distance using best practices under COVID-19.

The Problem: Climate change is already impacting lives and livelihoods, especially in the tropics. Nicaragua’s climate problems are exacerbated by widespread exploitation of ecosystems, land and wildlife. To restore its natural resilience, forests and local biodiversity need protection and care. Nearly one-third of Nicaragua’s population is under the age of 15. This rising generation is the key to positive change. Inspire them today!

The Solution: Our Junior Ranger program engages children ages 8-13 in active learning in the forests and beaches near where they live. It also provides them opportunities to give back to their communities through tree planting campaigns, beach cleanups, and sea turtle releases. Your help is needed to support 93 new students this year, many of whom have seen older siblings become Junior Rangers and are incredibly excited to begin learning.

The Long-term Impact: As Junior Rangers mature, their efforts will make major inroads for a sustainable economy and resilient landscape in their region. We have documented positive impacts like decreased consumption of sea turtle eggs, a major decrease in recreational slingshot hunting, and increased interest in jobs in science and sustainable ecotourism. Children who go through this program become significantly stronger stewards of nature and share what they learn with their friends and family. Support them today!

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Saving the planet requires millions of parts to be successful. You are needed. As a supporter of Paso Pacífico, you are already playing a part — but do you know how to multiply your efforts? Discover your power using the steps below!

1. Share

Share our social media posts and e-newsletters, as well as the experiences you’ve had—why you have saved nature through Paso Pacífico. Have you lived in Central America and fallen in love with the dry tropical forest? Been inspired by the passion of someone who has? Does rural environmental education or sustainable oyster production fire your imagination? Tell those whom you meet about the things you love.

Plan Icon 2. Plan

Whether it’s a birthday celebration or a sea-turtle-themed marathon, you can create your very own campaign page to help spread awareness and garner support for a specific goal. To do this, follow these simple steps:

  1. Go to pasopacifico.org/get-involved/take-action.
  2. Click on the category that interests you most. If you’re having trouble deciding which project to focus on, simply visit this link.
  3. Fill out the form to set up your profile. You will be asked for a numerical goal and a note about why you’re passionate about our cause. Then, you’ll be ready!

Invite Icon 3. Invite.

Invite anyone in your circles of friends, family, and acquaintances who you think might be interested in learning more about your goal.

Thank You Icon 4. Thank!

Follow up and be sure to thank every person who has helped you reach your goal. You can thank them publicly or privately; just be sure to let them know how grateful you are.

And thank you to those of you at home reading this — and considering taking these steps to help save our planet!

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