EnglishBy 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.
