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Your gifts brought people & forests together!
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In El Salvador, your gift helped farmers start to improve their livelihoods without cutting down valuable trees on their land! By connecting farmers with markets that pay for hardwood resins and oils, your dollars made it possible for farmers to earn money while keeping forests intact. While this is an early effort, your support made a difference.
Hardwood trees grow in Central America's dry tropical forests and are targets for timber traffickers. When rare trees like rosewood and Pacific mahogany are cut and sold at below-market prices, forests and farmers lose. Here's how timber trafficking works: Prospectors approach farmers, strike a deal for specific high-value tree species, and later return with cash for the farmer and a truck to haul away the timber. The farmers and the forest are then bereft of further benefits from the trees, and the forest takes decades to recover.
This situation is playing out in El Salvador. The Peru balsam tree (Myroxylon balsamum var. pereirae) is native to Central America's coastal forests. It has beautiful red hardwood, and so it's a target for illegal timber markets.
Yet, the Peru balsam tree also produces resins that are incredibly valuable for medicinal and cosmetic products. Through traditional methods, farmers have extracted balsam oil from these trees for hundreds of years. The practice scars the tree trunk, but does not destroy it.
Here is how the extraction is done:
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The farmers light up the end of a bundle of balsam stakes. With care and expertise, they burn the parts of the tree where the resin will be extracted. Then, they place rags along the burnt areas to absorb the resin.
These rags are thereafter strained and the resin is poured into bottles, ready to be sold to companies that will use it to enhance cosmetics, perfumes, and even medicines.
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Unfortunately, Salvadoran farmers who produce balsam products have been disconnected from the international market in recent years. But with your support, that is changing: We recently linked Salvadoran balsam oil products with a cosmetics company in France!
Now, conservation partner Man & Nature Foundation, which is associated with the cosmetics company, is working towards helping farmers trade one ton of balsam oil at a good price and generating proceeds to support community-based forest conservation efforts. This happened thanks to you.
Now more than ever, the world needs farmer-led solutions to protect our forests. Your support helped create more connections for a global impact. Thank you for your continued support.
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You helped local people benefit from forests!
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Kayla Padilla joined our team as a conservation associate last summer, after graduating from Trinity University with degrees in English and physical anthropology. She oversees Paso Pacífico's grants and helps produce our social media and written content, including this newsletter.
Currently based in Texas, Kayla has studied abroad in Central America to help conduct Maya archaeology, and is also passionate about journalism. She was initially drawn to the spider monkey conservation efforts you support after studying behaviors of the black-handed spider monkeys at the San Antonio Zoo for a semester.
We're so grateful to have Kayla on our team! Thank you for supporting her work.
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Thank you to the Arizona Game & Fish Department (AZGFD) and Southern Wings for helping donors like you support bird and habitat conservation efforts in El Salvador for the past two years. Neotropical migratory birds rely on habitats throughout the western hemisphere for safety and food. Finding and protecting these far-flung places are only possible through collaborations across countries, government agencies, and civil society.
Led by coordinator Edwin Juarez (shown above), the AZGFD's Bird Conservation Initiative has identified 18 priority bird species that overwinter in habitats where Paso Pacífico is involved. The endangered southwest willow flycatcher is one such priority bird.
Our work together has ranged from boosting citizen science events, like Global Big Day, to supporting El Salvador’s Ministerio de Medio Ambiente (MARN) in developing a guide for best practices in bird tourism. More recently, we have shifted attention to supporting MARN in developing bird conservation plans, working with Mujeres y Naturaleza (MUNAT) to bring bird awareness and appreciation to over 100 kids, and working with farmer groups next to Laguna Olomega to protect willow flycatcher habitat. These partnerships made your support go further for nature. Thank you for helping us work with other organizations to protect birds!
Southern Wings is a network that fosters bird conservation work among state fish and wildlife agencies. The AZGFD, a member of Southern Wings, is one of many U.S. state agencies that work to support bird conservation efforts beyond state borders. We are deeply grateful for the support received from the AZGFD and Southern Wings.
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Tiki Monkeys, a new charity-focused NFT community, has partnered with Paso Pacífico to raise money for monkeys!
Animal lover and technologist Karl Post founded Tiki Monkeys with the aim of building a NFT product that could support monkey conservation projects. And though the Tiki Monkey NFT art is far from what a black-handed spider monkey looks like (see art examples above), the company is focused on raising money for a good cause. Carbon emissions related to each sale will be offset through Offset Alliance.
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Join in on the pre-sale fun by purchasing an NFT between now and April 22, the official opening date of the public sale.
Mint a Tiki Monkey NFT and 20% of the minting proceeds and 3% of secondary sales will help with the survival of monkeys.
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The launch of this passion project will help raise support for our monkey efforts, and you can help too! The NFT collection is for sale on OpenSea. For more information, visit the Tiki Monkeys website and join their private group on Discord.
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PARTNERS MAKE IT POSSIBLE
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Meet Observadores de Aves del Oriente, a new group of 12 volunteer birders who are documenting the birds of eastern El Salvador. Your support is helping strengthen this group so that it can form the foundation of bird conservation there for generations to come.
On most weekends, this group of birders takes small outings to wetlands, volcanoes and forest patches to learn more about their region and the birds that depend on it. These passionate citizen scientists are recording their bird observations on eBird. The group also takes many beautiful photographs that it shares with the public, increasing awareness and love for birds. Their activities are self-funded and their expertise is growing through pure dedication to birds.
Through support from Partners in Flight and Southern Wings, we have provided this group with materials for educational outreach. We're excited to collaborate with these passionate birders!
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Thank you for your support!
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Thank you to all the photographers who contributed photos used in this e-newsletter. These include but are not limited to Eduardo Boné-Moron, Karl Post, Pasha Whitmire, Natasha Woodworth, and Paso Pacífico staff members Jarinton García, Milton Ñamendy, Sarah Otterstrom, and Kayla Padilla.
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