Saving the jocotoco and other birds

The Western Alliance for Nature raises money to save valuable wildlife habitat in North, Central and South America. Larry Wan, an outstanding wildlife photographer, and Sara Wan, a longtime member of the California Coastal Commission and defender of the environment, established this all-volunteer, nonprofit land conservancy.

Their alliance has been active in the fight to save Bolsa Chica, has worked to form a management plan for snowy plover and California least tern habitat in Ventura County and is also working to preserve habitat surrounding Laguna San Ignacio in Baja Mexico, the last remaining untouched birthing place for California gray whales.

In partnership with the American Bird Conservancy and the Fundacion Jocotoco of Ecuador (www.fjoco

toco.org), the alliance recently acquired an ecologically sensitive parcel of mountainous tropical forest in Ecuador. To help raise funds to purchase another 1,000 acres near the Ecuadorian city of Macara, the Wans put on a fundraiser last weekend at the Conservation and Research for Endangered Species center next to the San Diego Wild Animal Park.

While we were there, we took a great tour of the center. We hope to do a column at another time on the research being done there. Suffice it to say that the dollars that you spend at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and Zoo are helping to fund some very sophisticated and important wildlife research.

A number of other local environmentalists also attended. We saw Jim and Jennifer Robins; Mark Sturdivant; Flossie and Paul Horgan; Grace and Bob Winchell; Cat and Bob Waters; and other familiar faces in the crowd.

We had come, in part, to hear keynote speaker Robert Ridgely talk about conservation strategies for endangered birds. Ridgely is credited with identifying and describing an Ecuadorian bird species never before seen by scientists, the jocotoco antpitta. The papaya-shaped bird hops about on stilt legs, scanning the jungle floor for insects stirred up by army ants.

We think that Huntington Beach is blessed to have about 300 bird species fly through at one time or another. In the spring, a team of skilled birders can spot nearly 180 bird species in one day in Orange County. In the entire U.S., there are about 700 bird species. That sounds like an awful lot of birds, but tiny Ecuador puts us to shame. Ridgely laid out some statistics that floored us. Sandwiched on the Pacific Coast between Columbia and Peru, Ecuador boasts 1,600 species in an area that is smaller than the state of Colorado.

If you really want to be impressed by their number of different bird species per unit of land, consider this. Fundacion Jocotoco has already acquired seven preserves covering 15,000 acres. That’s a little more than 10 times as large as the Bolsa Chica wetlands and lower mesa. Within this area, a whopping 700 different species of birds have been found, many of them endemic. That means that they are found nowhere else.

The reserves are also home to many species of beautiful orchids and a recently discovered species of frog, as well as spectacled bears, pumas, jaguars, two species of tapirs and three species of monkeys.

All that variety of wildlife is beyond our imagination. But it may not be there much longer. There, as here, the human population is growing. Forests are being cleared to raise dairy cows. But the dry montane forests of the Andes are lousy places to raise dairy cows. Just cutting down trees in an area doesn’t necessarily turn the land into good grassy cow pasture. Plants are adapted to specific soils and microclimates. A high-altitude, dry forest ecosystem isn’t the same as grassy rangeland and can’t be readily converted to such.

In fact, the cows grazing on this cleared land give little milk and live only a few years because conditions are so harsh. The cows may not like living there, but the birds and frogs and orchids that had been there before the forests were cleared had thrived for thousands of years. Humans are constantly messing with the balance of nature, generally with disastrous consequences.

Fundacion Jocotoco and the Western Alliance for Wildlife would like to protect some of what is left. They have a unique opportunity to acquire about 1,000 acres of land from an Ecuadorian farmer who is giving up the frustrating battle of trying to raise dairy cows in this climate. His land is the largest contiguous tract of this type of habitat that is still in existence, with a good opportunity for successful reforestation of the denuded areas. Purchase of the land would protect the entire western part of the watershed, which is home to 59 endemic bird species.

The good news is that the purchase price is low compared to southern California standards. The entire tract can be saved for around $200,000. That’s about $200 an acre for one of the world’s most important and diverse habitats.

We did our share by bidding on and winning a silent auction item, a private, behind-the-scenes tour of the San Diego Natural History Museum. But the alliance still needs many more donors. If you would like to help preserve this rapidly disappearing habitat, a place where many of our migratory birds pass through, you can contact the Western Alliance for Nature at www.wanconservancy.com or call 310-456-0611. Tell them that Vic and Lou sent you.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].

20051027gzerw1ke(LA)