Environmental Conservation

January 19, 2022 by Paso Pacifico

After millennia of industrialization and ecologically harmful practices, the planet has now reached an advanced state of environmental deterioration. Among the most significant problems are global warming, deforestation, species extinction, and climate change.

The best path to mitigating or reversing these problems is through effective education for adults and children. In particular, teaching kids about our planet will equip them to better preserve the earth throughout their lives and for generations to come. That’s why environmental education programs that teach kids about conservation, sustainability, and climate change are so important.

The Benefits of Environmental Education for Children

Environmental education can be beneficial to young minds in the following ways:

Enhances Children’s Engagement with Learning. Environmental education offers a hands-on and immersive learning experience that will spark children’s curiosity and imagination. Integrating it into mainstream school curricula will enhance student engagement, which may also improve their progress in other academic areas.

Improves Critical and Creative Thinking Abilities. Immersive educational experiences drive children to discover why things in the natural world happen. This encourages critical thinking about how to solve complex environmental problems through mindful everyday acts as well as larger changes in practice and policy.
Encourages Healthy Lifestyles. Environmental education encourages outdoor activity. Getting kids outside to play and exercise can reduce the risk of childhood obesity, attention deficit disorders, anxiety, and depression, among other health problems.

Fosters Love for the Natural World. Exposing kids to fun activities in nature and outside play enhances their appreciation and sense of responsibility for the environment.

Paso Pacífico’s Junior Ranger program for children aged eight to thirteen is an excellent example of environmental education. This engaging and rigorous program combines classroom instruction with outdoor field trips and community service projects to instill ecology, biology, and environmental citizenship principles in children.

Our purpose at Paso Pacífico is to build wildlife corridors that connect people to nature and protect our biodiversity. Our mission is to preserve and restore the Pacific Slope ecosystems of Mesoamerica. Our innovative approach and partnership with the local communities, landowners, and partner organizations have helped us restore and protect habitats.

Will you help save nature today? Your donation will go directly to all our conservation programs in Paso Pacífico. Would you mind giving it today? For any inquiries, contact us here.

December 23, 2021 by Kayla Padilla

Paso Pacifico rangers closed out a period of migratory bird activities by hosting a ‘Festival of Kites’ for kids in Sapoa and Ostional with the motto “sing, fly and soar like birds.” In this activity, the children used their imaginations and crafting skills to use the kite as a metaphor. The kites represented the beautiful migratory birds that fly long distances to reach Central America during the winter.

The children ran through the beaches and watched their kites soar and fly, imitating the birds that have come a long way to visit the beaches and forests of Nicaragua.

On a bright and sunny day, the community rangers used this opportunity to talk to the kids about the importance of taking care of the beaches, mangroves, and forests that are home to thousands of birds and other animals. With this hands-on activity, kids were able to imagine what it’s like to soar like a bird!

May 28, 2021 by Paso Pacífico

By Jason G. Goldman

Later this month, more than 250 surfers from 52 nations will take to the waters of El Salvador to compete in the 2021 Surf City El Salvador ISA World Surfing Games. Meeting in the town of El Tunco, around 80 kilometers east of Los Cobanos on El Salvador’s Pacific Coast, the athletes will compete for the twelve remaining slots available for competition at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic games, which have been postponed due to the pandemic. The Tokyo games will be the first ever to feature surfing as a sport.

This is the culmination of a plan envisioned by President Nayib Bukele, potentially the world’s first politician to make the establishment of a surfing industry a campaign promise. It wouldn’t be the first time the Central American country has tried to support a surfing economy. After what seemed like a promising start in the 1970s, El Salvador slipped into a civil war that lasted over a decade. Surfers began to return in the early 1990s after the war ended, but there was never a concerted governmental push to support the industry – until now. Indeed, the economics support it: in 2015, some 350,000 tourists visited El Salvador from the U.S., with nearly forty percent choosing the country because of its beaches.

Both the development of Surf City at El Tunco and the promotion of surfing tourism in El Salvador in general have the potential to be either a boon or a nightmare for coastal conservation and for biodiversity, and it is still too soon to know which version of Surf City the future might hold.

Though surfing is itself considered a “non-consumptive” nature activity, because nothing is taken from the ocean by the act of surfing, it can still have negative impacts.

Once a particular area becomes popular for surfers, all the trappings of human development can quickly follow: trash, roads, erosion, water pollution, light pollution, noise pollution, habitat loss, deforestation and more. Eventually, surfers will move on to a newer, cleaner, less crowded spot – and leave behind a mess. It’s a pattern that Surfer Magazine‘s editor-at-large Steve Barilotti called “surfer colonialism” in a 2002 article.

Perhaps the worst part of surfer colonialism is the loss of local identity as a culture becomes commodified into trinkets and souvenirs, and as McDonalds and Starbucks move in and outcompete local, family-run restaurants and other businesses. This can result in a loss of authenticity or, perhaps even worse, a sort of contrived, staged authenticity for the benefit of wealthy tourists. Indeed, small-scale fishermen in El Salvador are already feeling – and resenting – the impacts of the wealth and business interests behind the drive to establish a surfing industry there.

On the other hand, because the sport is so intimately tied to the ocean, surfers are in a unique position to drive sustainability and conservation efforts to protect the place they love. In part, that comes from demanding higher, stricter, and tougher environmental standards not just from the businesses they support – like hotels, restaurants, and other parts of the tourism industry – but from the countries they choose to visit as well. Surfing tourists can also opt to support businesses that make direct financial contributions to conservation initiatives, and that are owned and operated by members of local communities.

A sustainable surfing industry can also inspire the establishment of national parks and marine reserves in order to protect natural resources for human and non-human communities alike, especially if park fees or other tourist taxes can be levied to support the ongoing oversight and enforcement costs involved in maintaining a protected area.

And while surfer colonialism represents one vision for the infrastructure that follows tourism, there is another, more sustainable pathway wherein tourism stimulates governmental (and private) investment in improving sewage treatment, waste management, transportation, cellular and internet access, and so on. If managed thoughtfully, these sorts of investments can lead to a long-term improvement in quality of life for the people who live in a place like Surf City, rather than the reverse.

Finally, like other sustainable nature-based tourism activities, a surfing economy offers full- and part-time jobs to members of local communities, which can offer alternatives to unsustainable sources of income (whether legal or illegal) such as poaching, mining, or logging. Most importantly, a community-oriented, sustainable surfing economy can facilitate meaningful cultural exchange between hosts and visitors, and can allow communities to preserve and share their cultural traditions through the establishment of special events and festivals.

It is still early enough in El Salvador’s drive to create a surfing economy that the country can go down either a more colonial or a more community-oriented pathway. Through its partnerships with El Salvador’s Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources, Paso Pacifico is working to ensure that the more sustainable pathway is chosen.

April 19, 2021 by Paso Pacífico

In Central America, some farmers use machetes to plant “living fences” and assist forest regrowth. There is significant potential for mass forest regrowth efforts using their techniques, but this information is hard to find.

Today, you can fund the pilot project that will gather this information, design easy instructions and pilot this program to 1000 farmers so they can grow 20,000 trees. Until 11:59 pm EDT on Friday, April 23, 2021, your donation will be doubled (up to $100) by GlobalGiving! After piloting, this program can then be refined and scale across the tropics, leading to hundreds of millions of new trees that help save our planet. Click here to donate to our planet today.

Challenge

Climate change threatens life on this planet. Though carbon finance programs aim to rapidly store carbon through growing trees, rural farmers are often excluded from their highly technical methods and top-down financing structures. These farmers often have unique knowledge and experience managing and cultivating forests by using their machetes to assist natural regeneration. Given the climate emergency, we need solutions that are inclusive and that can bring benefits to local livelihoods.

Solution

This project will gather expertise from small-scale rural farmers on the use of machetes to assist natural regeneration by removing vines, grasses and lianas from naturally growing trees. The program will also bring in farmer knowledge and technical resources on management cuttings from sprouts and stems to plant and grow trees quickly. These materials will be compiled and edited as an illustrated training manual. We will pilot this manual with 1000 farmers, helping them plant 20,000 trees.

Long-Term Impact

The training manual and work with 1000 farmers across Central America will lay the groundwork to scale up this approach to reach one million farmers in the region. As farmers are empowered to use their knowledge and tools to plant trees and grow small forests, they can reap the multiple benefits including food, timber, and ecosystem services. If 1 million farmers were to plant 3 trees, we could store 1 million tonnes of carbon and elevate the role of the farmers as climate heroes.

February 10, 2021 by Paso Pacífico

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.

February 4, 2021 by Paso Pacífico

By Jason G. Goldman

This is the third article in a three-part series on connectivity. Click here to read part one: “Coexistence, Not Corrals” and click here to read part two: “Building Bridges – Literally.”

Once upon a time, an animal that was sufficiently motivated could safely travel the 2500 miles from the forests of southern Mexico through Central America to wind up safely in Colombia. The so-called Mesoamerican land corridor is still used by animals that take to the skies, but those who are encumbered by Earth’s gravity must contend with an obstacle course of death just to go about their day. Wildlife-vehicle collisions on roadways are increasing throughout the world. Animals become electrocuted on power lines and battered by wind turbines. They are accidentally poisoned, burned, and drowned. They are intentionally poisoned, burned, and drowned.

One of the most damaging – but most invisible – threats they must overcome while navigating the hazards of daily life in the Anthropocene is the slow, steady deterioration of the habitats they rely on for food and shelter. As demand for pastures and cropland has grown, Central America has lost some eighty percent of its native vegetation. In the last twenty years alone, Nicaragua has lost more than 20 percent of its native forest cover. The forests that do remain have become fragmented, islands of habitat separated by wide swaths of city, suburb, and farmland.

Several years ago, researchers from Paso Pacífico, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Wisconsin wanted to understand how monkeys respond to the increasing conversion of the forests they and their ancestors have longed called home.

They discovered that the more fragmented, less protected forests in the Paso del Istmo region of Nicaragua hosted a more diverse primate population than did the Rio Escalante-Chococente Wildlife Refuge, which encompasses the largest remaining tropical dry forests in the country. Though the wildlife refuge supported more monkeys overall, they were mainly howler and capuchin monkeys, both classified as species of “least concern” by the IUCN.

It was only in the Paso del Istmo that any endangered black-handed spider monkeys were spotted – along with the howlers and capuchins. Conventional wisdom holds that spider monkeys require large, well-connected forests with a wide variety of fruit trees to survive. Their home ranges are quite large and they reproduce rather slowly, which ought to make them especially sensitive to habitat disturbance. Yet it turns out that even highly fragmented landscapes can still support populations of endangered monkeys.

It’s likely that at least some spider monkeys persist in the wildlife refuge where they are, apparently, harder to spot. Still, the lesson to take from the study is that our intuitions for conservation priorities would, at least in this instance, lead us astray. It might seem obvious at first glance that forest-reliant species would rapidly disappear along with forest cover, but the truth turns out to be quite a bit more complicated. Were conservationists to disregard fragmented areas simply because they were fragmented, it might be a net loss for conservation.

In Central America and elsewhere, landowners have been encouraged to cultivate trees as living fences in order to link larger swaths of forest elsewhere. Birds, bats, insects, and monkeys have all been observed using these as habitats and as travel corridors. In parts of Nicaragua where landowners have already begun implementing living fence rows, farmers report seeing spider monkeys and howler monkeys using them, alongside squirrels, sloths, iguanas, and a wide range of birds and insects.

The same principles apply even if you live in a city or suburb thousands of miles from the nearest monkey. Backyards benefit just as much from trees as do farms and ranches. Trees don’t simply offer habitats to urban-adapted critters; they create habitat complexity, making a space for species to move vertically as well as horizontally, or to hopscotch from yard to yard. The impacts are cumulative. According to a study conducted in Illinois, streets with multiple wildlife-friendly yards hosted nearly twice as many types of birds as those with fewer.

The ongoing loss of natural vegetation heralds a wide array of consequences for climate and biodiversity, but the truth is that many wildlife species are tenacious and can find a way to survive – and sometimes, even thrive – within a human-dominated landscape. And if wild animals can find a way to get by even while we convert their forests into farms and ranches, shouldn’t we do our part to make life at least a little bit easier for them?

January 8, 2021 by Paso Pacífico

By Jason G. Goldman

This is the second article in a three-part series on connectivity. Click here to read part one: “Coexistence, Not Corrals” and click here to read part three: “Making Way for Monkeys.”

The natural world is being carved and sliced into smaller and smaller parcels. Forests and grasslands and deserts are becoming like individually wrapped fun-size candy bars of nature, each with its own fragmented community of wild plants and animals. The natural world is in many ways a collection of islands; where they’re not separated by water, they’re separated by pavement.

In 2015, a global team of researchers estimated that seventy percent of the planet’s forests lie within just one kilometer of an edge. One out of every five trees is rooted within just one hundred meters of an edge. That’s less than the length of an American football field. Fragmented habitats have lower species richness, lower nutrient retention, and lower animal movement.

Given how rapidly the Earth’s landscape has become fragmented in recent decades, the long-term impacts on biodiversity remain unknown. Depending on the animals or plants in question, it might take years or even decades before the effects of fragmentation begin to become apparent. Still, reversing those effects has, in many places, already begun.

Habitat restoration is one strategy to reverse the effects of fragmentation, but there are many places where this is simply impossible. In those places, researchers and conservationists have turned to mitigation strategies instead: if the habitat fragments can’t be fully reintegrated, perhaps we can provide opportunities for animals to safely move between them. It wouldn’t just help to maintain genetic diversity, but to perpetuate the movement of nutrients across a wider landscape.

Here are some of the ways that conservationists are experimenting with increasing connectedness, in Central America and around the world.

Living Fences

Starting nearly a decade ago, Paso Pacifico began working with landowners in Nicaragua’s Paso del Istmo region to reforest small areas of their farms and ranches. By prioritizing areas near rivers or existing forests, the idea was to increase the amount of space available to wildlife. In all, some 250 hectares were restored in this way. The problem for landowners was that any reforestation meant losing out on potential financial gains from working that land.

To circumvent that problem, Paso Pacifico began encouraging the cultivation of living fencerows, a mix of native tree species that could be planted alongside existing property lines or field boundaries. It’s a strategy that was already becoming widespread throughout Central America.

Fencerows can have a tremendous impact on biodiversity. One study conducted in Costa Rica and Nicaragua documented at least 167 animal species within fence rows, including birds, bats, beetles, and butterflies. Animals used fencerows to feed on fruits, flowers, and nectar. They used them for shelter. Some were even seen mating within them. Perhaps most importantly, birds, bats, and monkeys have all been documented using fencerows as travel corridors. Even so, at one site, at least a third of the birds observed in fencerows were considered “forest dependent.” It means that these corridors weren’t just used for travel but functioned themselves as suitable habitat.

It’s not just beneficial for wildlife. Farmers can use their living fencerows as well, sustainably harvesting fruit and firewood for sale or for their own personal use. As with most conservation strategies, the most productive ones benefit people and animals alike.

The Right (of) Way

Long rows of trees and shrubs can create travel corridors for wildlife even in the most heavily developed parts of Europe and North America. Some utility companies there have begun to treat their easements and rights-of-way, such as the space below aerial power-lines, alongside railroads and highways, or above gas pipes as potential wildlife habitats.

Like the fencerows of Central America, these corridors aren’t only a means of traveling between two larger, protected areas, but function as habitats themselves. According to a 2016 study conducted in Sweden, for example, power-line corridors were important habitats for butterflies, whether or not they were near larger forests. It turned out that power-line corridors increased butterfly diversity in an area ten times wider than the corridor itself.

Similarly, of all native ant, spider, and grasshopper species in the Netherlands, more than half have been recorded using these bits of habitat, including a number of threatened or endangered species. In North Carolina, rare toads, turtles, and snakes have been spotted in roadside patches, and in Australia you can find two rare types of pygmy possums alongside highways – if you look closely enough.

Rights-of-way are also helpful for conserving rare plants. In Australia, green corridors along highways are home to most of the remaining individuals for two rare types of Acacia; more than a fifth of 32 rare plant species in Sweden rely on rights-of-way for their continued survival.

To be sure, rights-of-way can only offer suitable habitats insofar as they are managed with biodiversity in mind. That’s why the Kansas Audubon Society consults with the state’s Department of Transportation, for example, to develop sustainable mowing practices and seeding disturbed sites with native vegetation. It’s why in Tennessee, the Department of Transportation now waits to mow until winter begins, allowing the vegetation growing alongside its 13,000 miles of roads to provide useful habitat all spring and summer. It’s also why an Indiana-based power company has begun cultivating wildflowers beneath some eighty acres of solar panels in an effort to aid pollinator conservation in tandem with a shift to more sustainable energy generation.

Bridges and Tunnels

The last remaining migration of pronghorn antelopes occurs in western Wyoming. The 150-mile “Path of the Pronghorn” is one of the longest mammal migrations left in North America, but the corridor intersects with roads and highways. Twice each year, up to two thousand pronghorn – and another three thousand mule deer – pass through the area. They’ve been using this stretch of what is now highway 191 for at least six thousand years.

Several years ago, the state of Wyoming decided to install eight crossings along twelve miles of US Highway 191: two overpasses and six underpasses, each with strategically placed fencing to funnel animals towards those spots. Before the crossings were built, there were 85 wildlife-vehicle collisions per year, on average. Afterwards, that number dropped by 70 percent. By the fourth year, every single pronghorn successfully avoided crossing the highway’s asphalt-covered surface

Elsewhere, Canada’s Banff National Park, through which passes the Trans-Canada Highway, has six wildlife bridges – and a whopping thirty-eight tunnels. That’s the highest number of crossings in a single area anywhere on the planet. According to one study, over the course of sixteen years, eleven species of large mammals, prey and predators alike, were recorded using them more than 150,000 times. The elk were so eager to use them that they didn’t even need to wait for construction to be completed!

Bridges can even be in the sky. In South India, lion tailed macaques – an endangered monkey found only in this part of the world – were too often killed trying to cross a highway that cut through their forest. To solve the problem, a group of NGOs worked together with the government to fund the installation of aerial bridges, connecting the tree canopy on either side of the road. It’s a fairly low-cost way to ensure that monkeys, and other animals that spend their time among the leaves and branches, can avoid the threat of becoming roadkill.

Click here to read part three: “Making Way for Monkeys.”

November 18, 2020 by Paso Pacífico

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

September 26, 2020 by Anna Chevez

Después de varios meses de aislamiento en nuestros hogares, gracias a Dios hemos podido salir al campo con nuestros guardaparques junior a recibir clases al aire libre. Tomando siempre medidas de precaución ante el Covid19.

En éste recorrido por el río de la comunidad de Ostional, hemos retomado las prácticas de observación y conteo de aves, también buscamos monos congos e identificamos algunos insectos que encontramos en el camino.

Fue una tarde muy alegre para todos.

May 19, 2020 by Anna Chevez

Durante el mes de abril, los Juniors Rangers de las diferentes comunidades han participado en un concurso de dibujo, el cual consistía en dibujar el animal o paisaje favorito. A continuación les dejamos las bellas obras que resultaron del talento de nuestros pequeños artistas.

English translation: Drawing Our Favorite Landscape

During the month of April, Junior Rangers from different communities participated in a drawing competition, which consisted of drawing their favorite animal or landscape. Below. we share the beautiful works that resulted from the talent of our little artists.

Environmental Education for Kids

The Benefits of Environmental Education for Children

Challenge

Solution

Long-Term Impact

Living Fences

The Right (of) Way

Bridges and Tunnels