Post by gallito on May 9, 2016 13:01:12 GMT -5
Colombia;a Birders Paradise - Part 2
Beyond the Coca Curtain: Can Birding Build an Economic Base in Colombia?
Colombia hosts more bird species than in any other country on the planet, but for years nobody dared to seek them. Now, with peace on the horizon, birders could offer a solution.
Three a.m. is horrible. Almost nothing happens at that hour that you won’t regret later. And yet, at three on a Wednesday morning in June, here I am folding myself into the back of an ancient Toyota Land Cruiser. What, you ask, could possibly inspire me to embark on a bleary pre-dawn odyssey up the flanks of the eastern Andes? To do so voluntarily, even eagerly? The opportunity to see something I could see nowhere else in the world, that’s what—the newest bird known to science, first described in March 2015: the Perijá Tapaculo.
The Perijá Tapaculo’s namesake is the Serranía del Perijá—the northernmost extent of the eastern Andes. Colombia and Venezuela share a long stretch of border across these mountains, and these peaks and valleys have been a stronghold of guerrilla activity for decades. Even while other parts of Colombia became safe to visit in the early 2000s, the Perijá region languished. In 2004 a Colombian ornithologist, a botanist, and their guide were kidnapped and held captive for months before being released unharmed; the first scientific paper to systematically describe the birdlife in the area was published only in 2014. The Perijá is, in many ways, uncharted terrain for those in the bird biz.
That novelty was reinforced for me over coffee two days ago, sitting on a veranda surrounded by chirrupping frogs and humid darkness. One of my travel compatriots, Colombian biologist Patricia Falk, remarked, “I cannot believe I’m in the Perijá. I never thought I’d be able to visit here in my entire life.” As an American, the idea that there might be a part of my home country (barring Area 51) that I simply could never visit is utterly foreign. “Growing up in Cali, the Perijá was this faraway, mythical land full of fabulous animals,” Falk said. “But its remoteness and the danger meant that almost nobody ever got to visit.”
It sure still feels remote at zero-dark-thirty as we huff diesel fumes in the back of La Pechichona, a.k.a. “the Spoiled One,” the Land Cruiser we hired to haul us up the mountain. Jammed into the back of the truck, which is helpfully outfitted with a long bench on each side of the bed and a huge steel rollcage overhead, are Falk and another Colombian biologist, Gloria Lentijo; two colleagues from Audubon; a Colombia-based Chilean photographer who has spent years covering the FARC and the drug trade; an internationally known California-based Chilean bird guide named Alvaro Jaramillo; and two local guides. Plus the driver—10 people crammed into one vehicle for a kidney-pulping, multi-hour grind up over 10,000 feet to scout out the region for potential inclusion in a nascent ecotourism-based rural economic development project. The mission: Spend a few days in the Perijá to suss out just where well-heeled gringo birders might go, stay, or fly through as they (er, we) attempt to score more birds for their life lists. The hope is that the ecotourists to inject enough resources into the local economy to keep a meaningful mass of people from engaging in ecosystem-killing illegal mining or clear-cut agriculture.
Cont. reading: www.audubon.org/magazine/march-april-2016/beyond-coca-curtain-can-birding-build
Beyond the Coca Curtain: Can Birding Build an Economic Base in Colombia?
Colombia hosts more bird species than in any other country on the planet, but for years nobody dared to seek them. Now, with peace on the horizon, birders could offer a solution.
Three a.m. is horrible. Almost nothing happens at that hour that you won’t regret later. And yet, at three on a Wednesday morning in June, here I am folding myself into the back of an ancient Toyota Land Cruiser. What, you ask, could possibly inspire me to embark on a bleary pre-dawn odyssey up the flanks of the eastern Andes? To do so voluntarily, even eagerly? The opportunity to see something I could see nowhere else in the world, that’s what—the newest bird known to science, first described in March 2015: the Perijá Tapaculo.
The Perijá Tapaculo’s namesake is the Serranía del Perijá—the northernmost extent of the eastern Andes. Colombia and Venezuela share a long stretch of border across these mountains, and these peaks and valleys have been a stronghold of guerrilla activity for decades. Even while other parts of Colombia became safe to visit in the early 2000s, the Perijá region languished. In 2004 a Colombian ornithologist, a botanist, and their guide were kidnapped and held captive for months before being released unharmed; the first scientific paper to systematically describe the birdlife in the area was published only in 2014. The Perijá is, in many ways, uncharted terrain for those in the bird biz.
That novelty was reinforced for me over coffee two days ago, sitting on a veranda surrounded by chirrupping frogs and humid darkness. One of my travel compatriots, Colombian biologist Patricia Falk, remarked, “I cannot believe I’m in the Perijá. I never thought I’d be able to visit here in my entire life.” As an American, the idea that there might be a part of my home country (barring Area 51) that I simply could never visit is utterly foreign. “Growing up in Cali, the Perijá was this faraway, mythical land full of fabulous animals,” Falk said. “But its remoteness and the danger meant that almost nobody ever got to visit.”
It sure still feels remote at zero-dark-thirty as we huff diesel fumes in the back of La Pechichona, a.k.a. “the Spoiled One,” the Land Cruiser we hired to haul us up the mountain. Jammed into the back of the truck, which is helpfully outfitted with a long bench on each side of the bed and a huge steel rollcage overhead, are Falk and another Colombian biologist, Gloria Lentijo; two colleagues from Audubon; a Colombia-based Chilean photographer who has spent years covering the FARC and the drug trade; an internationally known California-based Chilean bird guide named Alvaro Jaramillo; and two local guides. Plus the driver—10 people crammed into one vehicle for a kidney-pulping, multi-hour grind up over 10,000 feet to scout out the region for potential inclusion in a nascent ecotourism-based rural economic development project. The mission: Spend a few days in the Perijá to suss out just where well-heeled gringo birders might go, stay, or fly through as they (er, we) attempt to score more birds for their life lists. The hope is that the ecotourists to inject enough resources into the local economy to keep a meaningful mass of people from engaging in ecosystem-killing illegal mining or clear-cut agriculture.
Cont. reading: www.audubon.org/magazine/march-april-2016/beyond-coca-curtain-can-birding-build