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One Turtle Saved

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Fifteen years ago the hawksbill sea turtle in my hands would have been hog-tied, whisked hundreds of miles, slaughtered and carved into trinkets.

Now, it swims free.

On Baja’s Pacific coast, an adult male hawksbill sea turtle found its way into a fisherman’s net. In the past, for the fisherman anyway, such a thing would have been considered a stroke of good luck. The endless demand for turtle meat, eggs, skin and shell on the black market can provide a nice payday to anyone willing to endure the low-level risk of being caught.

Hawksbill turtles, once common, are now the rarest of the rare due to decades of being hunted for their beautiful shells, which get carved into combs, broaches, and other adornments.

These days, however, a Mexican grassroots conservation movement called GrupoTortuguero.org has challenged the old ways and shaken things up a bit. A network of thousands of fishermen, women and children count themselves among its ranks.

Among the fishermen working to save turtles, is Julio Solis, featured in this short film.

Julio Solis, A MoveShake Story from RED REEL on Vimeo.

Wallace J. Nichols, Brad Nahill, and the team at SEE Turtles and SEEtheWILD chronicle efforts to save endangered sea turtles in the inaugural issue of WildHope, their new online magazine.

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Via the Sustainable Brands newsletter:

Burt’s Bees is collaborating with artists and experts at the Pollinator Partnership to generate greater public awareness about the importance of honeybees to agriculture and the threats they face.

For such small, short-lived creatures, bees do a lot of heavy lifting to keep life on Earth in balance. In fact, an estimated one-third of the food on Earth depends on pollination by bees. Because they are instrumental to biodiversity, they are what scientists call indicator species, functioning as an alarm system for the health of ecosystems.

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Nearly every scientist agrees that all bees need nesting habitats and a variety of healthy flower food to thrive – and they’re in short supply. Humans have used up all the land – we’ve planted crops from field edge-to-edge, lawns from yard to yard (no bee food there), and fancy ornamental plants where once scruffy natives used to stand. In most agricultural settings today, bees find only one kind of food for days and weeks on end, which is unhealthy (and perhaps boring) for the insects.

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This June for National Pollinator Week, Burt’s Bees will premiere “Burt Talks to the Bees”, a series of three short films created by Isabella Rossellini, actor, director and Burt impersonator. The films introduce the bees – the queen, the workers and the drones – in an effort to make viewers more sympathetic to their plight.

The first in the video series introduces us to worker bees and how honey is made. The Sustainable Brands piece outlines many of the reasons we are active in advancing the scientific understanding of pollinators and reviving the tradition of meliponiculture.

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From NatGeo DailyNews:

Jaguars currently live in isolated populations scattered across North and South America, which is part of the reason the species is listed as “near threatened” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

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Usually, just one jaguar cub survives in a litter, so seeing two cubs alive and well is “heartwarming,” he said. (Take a big cats quiz.)

It’s “important to note” that the camera traps were located on the plantation border, next to a well-preserved forest.

View more pictures (courtesy of NatGeo and Panthera) here.

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From Red Orbit:

The first ever photographs of jaguars within an oil plantation in Colombia have just been released…

Panthera, the world’s leading wild cat conservation organization, focuses solely on the study and conservation of wild cats. The camera traps placed by Panthera in the Magdalena River valley were meant to gather information about the dangers of Colombia’s growing oil plantations on the jaguar populations. Panthera’s objective is to understand how the plantations affect the jaguar’s ability to move throughout its habitat, reproduce, and the effects on species that the jaguars prey on.

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Today’s 60-Second Science podcast from Scientific American:
Birds and Bats Downsized Bugs
Insect size tracked with atmospheric oxygen levels, until hungry birds and bats hit the scene.
In the day of the dinosaur, insects had wingspans of nearly two-and-a-half feet. So why are today’s bugs so puny?
Photo courtesy of Bruce Taubert Wildlife Photography
http://www.brucetaubert.com/

Birds and bats!

Researchers at U.C. Santa Cruz have published their findings on the evolution of insect size in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Visit the Scientific American site for more.

Visit our website to learn more about Neotropical Migratory Birds in Central America, or to learn how our scientists are Valuing the Ecosystem Services of Bats.

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As we honor the life and work of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, let’s celebrate the fact that she was right: we can peacefully co-exist with each other and with nature.

A great way to understand how is to look at community-managed sustainable fisheries.

As reported on NPR’s Morning Edition, when New England’s fish stocks became severely depleted, a lack of fish put a lot of fishermen out of business. One group of fishermen in Port Clyde, Maine, changed the marketing and processing of their catch in hopes of making more money on fewer fish. Chefs like Joseph Margate of Boston’s Liberty Hotel are fans of this approach. “Chefs are only as good as their ingredients; technique only gets you so far. And good ingredients would be impossible without healthy lands and waters,” Margate said in an interview with Nature.Org.

A few small sustainable fisheries make a big difference.
An international team of scientists has gathered the first conclusive evidence that even small protected areas can help the whole ocean. Their study, summarized in ScienceDaily has shown that even fish populations in areas open to larger-scale commercial fishing can benefit from small-scale protections.

Paso Pacífico has a new initiative for Sustainable Fisheries and Local Resource Management and we’ll keep you posted about it on our website and here on our blog. This community-building program is empowering citizen scientists to monitor and manage the natural resources their livelihoods depend on.

Sustainable fisheries are turtle friendly!
One of the reasons Paso Pacífico is so active in sustainable fisheries is to reduce the number of sea turtles caught in fishermen’s nets, so we’ll publish some of the findings from our initial fisheries assessment later this week, just in time for World Sea Turtle Day, June 16th. If you want to stay in the loop, sign up for our newsletter.

Update, June 14
The New York Times has published an Elinor Ostrom reading list: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/elinor-ostrom-reading-list/

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Today at the New York Times Green blog:

On beaches, poachers snatch up their eggs and babies for stewing; at sea, adults get snagged by fishermen’s long lines and nets. Now, climate change joins the list, threatening the survival of critically endangered leatherback sea turtles in the Pacific.

Turtles, the article explains, will have an especially difficult time adapting to climate change for a couple of reasons. First, moving farther north to cooler nesting beaches means a greater risk of poachers away from places like Costa Rica and our beaches in Nicaragua, where turtles are protected. Second, sea turtles often don’t nest until they are 30 years old. With so few generations between now and the time nesting beaches become inhabitable, there is little time for natural selection to kick in.

For now, Dr. Spotila sees leatherback survival as a constant struggle. While other researchers fight to alleviate the threats that fisheries and development pose to adult leatherbacks, he grapples with how to make the beach more favorable for nestlings. Although national parks prevent egg poaching, conservationists now face the prospect of having to either install miles of sprinkler units to keep eggs moist, or to devise a shading system to cool hundreds of nests.

Who will solve this problem?
We are among those working to alleviate the threats of fisheries and development, and protect Leatherback, Olive Ridley, Hawksbill, and Green sea turtles. We are pleased to share the many ways we are working to mitigate climate change and ensure the survival of sea turtles.

Meet Our Turtle Rangers: Paso Pacifico’s Turtle Rangers form the “thin green line” between critically endangered sea turtles and would-be poachers and predators. (Watch our Ranger Slideshow.)

Turtle-friendly Fisheries: Our sustainable fisheries program helps fishermen transition away from gill nets to turtle-friendly fishing gear.

Mitigating Climate Change: Our reforestation projects help mitigate climate change.

You can help!
Sponsor a junior turtle ranger.
Protect a turtle nest.
Replace a gill net.
Plant a tree.

Encourage your friends to show support:
Like us Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Subscribe to our newsletter
Share our YouTube videos

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The Independent asks what to do when one endangered species starts eating another:

That is the problem facing environmentalists whose research shows that jaguars, themselves at risk of extinction, are increasingly preying on endangered turtle species.

Experts said that the predation of adult turtles by the big cats in a Costa Rican national park “has now reached a magnitude never before recorded”.

“More and more jaguars are being pushed towards the coastline, where they find sea turtles, which are easy prey,” said Diogo Verissimo, researcher with the Durrell Institute of Ecology and Conservation and Global Vision International.

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Image courtesy of Gus Harper, artist

Many people have been highlighting the importance of bees lately. Much of the news has been bad: bees disappearing, crops failing, etc. Fortunately, while climate change, shifts in agriculture, deforestation, and other factors have threatened some bee populations, it is possible for bees to make a comeback. The really good news is we can help.

Dating back to the time of the Great Pyramids, humans have practiced beekeeping, and, as Gene Kritsky writes, “in the millennia since, we have continued to study and improve upon beehive designs, making beekeeping the modern science it is today.” He’s right. Urban beekeeping is on the rise in the United States. Bee doctor Noah Wilson-Rich, PhD is helping city dwellers plant rooftop and other gardens to provide habitat for foraging honeybees. And yesterday CNN’s Next List introduced us to Andrew Coté of Bees Without Borders, dedicated to poverty alleviation through beekeeping.

In Nicaragua, we’re alleviating poverty and protecting biodiversity by reviving the ancient tradition of meliponiculture, the management of Melipona and Trigona bees, as practiced by the Mayans. Wild bees, which nest in hollow trees and ground cavities, are brought home by beekeepers who maintain healthy bee colonies and harvest honey and other hive products.

Our intern, Sarah Rudeen, is headed to San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico to join Nicaraguan biologists at a conference and workshop organized by the Mexican university Eco-Sur to learn about native beekeeping and commercializing bee and honey products for the benefit of communities. Not only does the honey provide a valuable source of calories in a an area where food security is not always completely stable, it provides a means of income for the beekeeper and his or her family. In addition, bees provide valuable ecosystem services.

Native bees maintain year-round pollination services in dry tropical forests, like those found in Nicaragua. While the nesting and breeding seasons of large bees match the blooming seasons in dry forests, small bees visit and pollinate flowers throughout the year. Bees pollinate valuable cash crops in rural Nicaragua, and provide an estimated 50% of pollination in dry forests. We might say the importance of bees to the biodiversity of Central America is immeasurable, but we’re actually working on ways to quantify the value of the ecosystem services bees (and other pollinators, like bats) provide.

When our newly trained team of meliponiculturists return to Nicaragua, armed with information from Mexican beekeepers and entomologists, they will revive a rich cultural history and help individuals and local cooperatives save local ecosystems and launch new business ventures to economically empower rural communities.

We are grateful to the Turner Foundation for their support of our beekeeping program.

If you are interested, you can also make a contribution to our efforts to restore the ancient practice of meliponiculture for poverty alleviation and biodiversity conservation.

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Yesterday we took part in the Parrot Care Project and Cage xChange event at Omar’s Exotic Birds in Santa Monica.

Here’s what we shared with the people in attendance about our Yellow-Naped Amazon Parrot Conservation Program:

As an environmental conservation organization dedicated to habitat restoration and community empowerment in Nicaragua, we’ve been studying the Yellow-Naped Amazon parrot for four years. We’re here today to share with you what the Yellow-Naped Amazon has taught us about the needs of parrots everywhere.

One of the reasons we study the Yellow-Naped Amazon Parrot is because a healthy parrot population is an excellent sign of a mature and healthy forest. Forest health is important to Paso Pacifico because we are dedicated to biodiversity conservation from ridge to reef and deforestation is common in the rural areas where we work. The reasons for deforestation are rapid tourism development, road construction, commercial forestry, agricultural expansion, and wildfires. The results of deforestation are less canopy for tree-dwelling species like sloths and spider monkeys, and fewer foraging, roosting, and nesting spots for the Yellow-Naped Amazon parrot.

In fact, one of the first things we learned in studying the Yellow-Napes is that, unfortunately there are so few left in coastal Nicaragua, that it is difficult to come up with a reliable population estimate. This tells us that the work we’re doing is important and that the Central American cousins of the parrots you have at home need our help. Two species of parrot who used to live and thrive in the forests of Nicaragua are now locally extinct, the Scarlet Macaw and the Great Green Macaw. We do not want to see the Yellow-Naped Amazon disappear from Central American forests, too.

Ostional school mural by Lezamón

In their native home — which spans the mountain and coastal forests from southern Mexico into Costa Rica — Yellow-Napes have taught us just what the parrot vets and nutritionists and behavioralists are talking about today: parrots are intelligent and social birds with complex needs.

We work with wildlife biologists and ornithologists who specialize in parrots, foresters and ecologists who specialize in tropical forestry, graduate students eager to learn more, and citizen scientists who help us monitor birds and gather data in the field.

We have observed Yellow-napes as they travel from the moist forests of Costa Rica during rainy season to the dry forests of Nicaragua during the dry season. Parrots travel from forest to forest as the seasons change to get more fruit. In the rainy season, moist forests are more productive and offer more fruit. In the dry season, dry forests are more productive and offer more fruit. Watching the Yellow-Napes travel from forest to forest to forage for food, we’ve learned just what Tiffany explained about parrot nutrition: these birds need variety in their diets.

Parrots don’t just need healthy areas of forest with fruit-bearing trees; they need forested corridors allowing them to travel from dry forests to moist. In other words, parrots travel a lot. Just as Mira Tweti is trying to emphasize with her Cage Xchange program: parrots need a great deal of room to move.

In order to know where to go to find these fruit-rich forests, parrots need to talk to each other. Parrots require dense forests with trees large enough to support communal roosting. It is during communal roosting that individual parrots and parrot flocks share information with each other about the best locations for finding food. What we’ve learned from watching Yellow-napes communicating during communal roosting, is just what Tiffany and Hillary have explained: parrots are intelligent and social; they need families; they need to communicate with others.

In addition to requiring both moist and dry forests, healthy forest corridors, a variety of fruit-bearing trees, and communal roosting trees, parrots require specific kinds of trees for nesting. Nesting sites are crucial for threatened birds like the Yellow-Naped Amazon, as we protect existing birds and work to increase the overall population.

Parrots require tall trees for nesting or large, mature trees which form natural cavities, where the parrots like to lay their eggs. Without suitable nesting sites, parrots don’t nest, and for a species which has only two eggs per clutch, this is highly problematic in terms of ensuring a healthy population.

Just as this campaign is dedicated to helping you keep your parrots healthy by providing larger homes for your birds, we are helping these endangered parrots rebuild healthy populations by expanding the size of their home through reforestation. In the past five years, we have planted over 500,000 trees, making sure to plant the species of trees parrots prefer for foraging, roosting, and nesting.

In healthy forests, parrots face yet another threat: poachers who can shimmy up the trunks of even the tallest trees to take parrot eggs right from their nests. Poachers usually sell parrot eggs and hatched parrots into the illegal pet trade, which leaves even fewer parrots in the wild. What we have learned from observing Yellow-Napes and the devastating effects of poaching is the importance of adopting parrots from responsible people like Omar, who rescue birds and help them find better homes.

To increase the number of successful parrot nests, we do two things: we build parrot nesting boxes and we incentivize people to find and protect parrot nests.

Parrot nesting boxes are constructed of PVC pipes which are assembled to mimic the natural cavities of tree trunks preferred by parrots. Once assembled, the nest boxes are lined with wood chips and camouflaged with paint, branches, and leaves. We pay former poachers, who have learned about the importance of protecting this threatened species, to shimmy high up into the trees and secure these nest boxes far from predators.

Our incentive program for protecting parrots makes cash awards to people who observe and report a parrot nest, share the nest’s location, and promise to help protect the nest from poachers and other predators. Each found nest earns the finder $20, which is almost two week’s salary in rural Nicaragua. Once the eggs have hatched, and the young parrots have left the nest for the forest, we pay $40 per Yellow-Naped Amazon fledgling. Direct payments for conservation achieve excellent results, and just this nesting season, we’ve seen four nests reported and eight fledglings successfully leave their nests. That means more of your pet parrots’ distant cousins are living free in the forest.

Slingshot-binocular exchange partners:
Optics for the Tropics

Another way we’re helping the Yellow-Naped Amazon make a comeback is by raising awareness through educational events like this. We teach Nicaraguan children about their parrot neighbors and their importance in the world. In rural areas, many children play with slingshots and will shoot the birds out of trees. To tackle this problem, we host slingshot amnesty days, where each kid who turns in a slingshot and signs a pledge to become a friend to parrots receives a brand new pair of binoculars. These kids, who have come to love their parrot neighbors and are learning more about the birds and the forests they call home, would undoubtedly be excited to know there are people here in Santa Monica learning about them and the place where they live.

What we have learned from observing the Yellow-Napes is that expanding the area they call home, ensuring they can gather to communicate, providing access to crucial foraging sites and fruit-bearing trees, and creating a culture of conservation is helping the parrots. We are grateful that you are here to learn how to provide the right habitat and diet for your bird, and to understand how to communicate with your bird. We are thankful to be included at an event like this and pleased to conect with so many other parrot experts and parrot lovers. We hope you will help us as we work to study and save your birds’ cousins in Central America.

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