Ran out of things to do in Mérida this week, so I took the initiative to plan my own kid birding class for the coming week. I'm now off to El Cuyo, that first little village on the north coast, to give a 4.5 day class to 6 kids between the ages of 6-9 with very little birding experience. Here's what the general plan looks like:
Day 1 -Thoughts and opinions about birds -Birding ethics, what to do and not to do -How to use binoculars -Prepare and decorate field notebooks -List all the birds they already know -Pick which kind of bird the kids will act as for the week
Day 2 -Go birding! -Review the birds we saw -Parts of birds -Some basic groups of birds -How to use a field guide -15 common species -Important things to look at for identification -5 common songs -Short birding walk to look at the things we talked about -Draw a bird in the field
Day 3 -Go birding! -Learn and play games about habitat -Learn and play games about breeding
Day 4 -Go birding! -Learn and play game about Miration -Plan our surprise project (more to come...)
Before left for Mexico, I was warned to expect the unexpected when working with a Latin American non-governmental organization. Initially, I thought this meant, "Be prepared for things like last-minute changes of plan, walking alone in the rain through flooded city streets while searching for a cab home, and digestive dystopia." While all of this may have already happened in the last week, I did not expect to have to rethink the entire purpose of why I am here.
After settling down in the city of Mérida last week, I began working with NyC's environmental education team on their water conservation project. After the first two days of simply observing their staff give presentations about water conservation to students at an elementary school, I realized it was going to be a lot harder than I expected to do what I came here wanting to do: make a real and immediate difference by taking kids out into nature and showing them beauty waiting to be discovered. It finally hit me that because of various logistical reasons I wasn't going to get to do this until the middle of July, at the earliest.
Fortunately, that same day I met with Barbara MacKinnon, bird conservation legend in the Yucatán Peninsula. Barbara has been working in the Yucatán for over 40 years and possibly has more on-the-ground conservation experience than anyone else here. She is a true conservationist. Although she has conducted some bird population surveys, she quickly denies that she is a scientist. Chatting with her I quickly learned that we share many of the same frustrations with the limiting mindset of "pure science". Given her extensive background, she was the perfect person to express my summer concerns to. Among many things, Barbara reminded me that it is important to observe before doing but it is also up to me to take the initiative to do the things I want to do. She also told me that the most important thing I can do here is show local people their worth by bringing out the knowledge of nature they already have and showing them it is valuable.
Students eager to answer a question about water conservation
The next two days I went with NyC to the rural village of Dzununcam to help conduct interviews with the landowners about their water use and contamination. While this type of work isn't why I came to Mexico, in these two days I feel like I gained more insight on Latin American conservation than I have in two years at Cornell. Throughoutmy travels in Latin America I have driven by dozens of poor villages like Dzununcam, but this was the first time I have spent hours walking through the streets, going into people's farms and houses, and actually talking to them. I wish I had photos to show exactly what this place is like, but bringing a camera would have been inappropriate so for now I'll play reporter.
The first man we interviewed went on a ten-minute rant about the government after we asked if he received any governmental support for his farm. He explained how he has seen over and over how political candidates come and visit his village, promise change and support, and then never return. He believes that the government is unfair and corrupt has no intention of helping people like him. The third person we interviewed was a man from Mérida who runs a tiny (and disgusting) pig farm in Dzununcam. While at first he tried to turn us away by saying he had work to do, after just a few questions he was showing us around his property and talking his head off about his problems. His place is absolutely revolting. In addition to the mountains of junk and garbage piled everywhere, the place reeks of pig feces. I looked into his well, the thing that we were there to interview him about, and saw that the shallow, black puddle at the bottom was moving, literally squirming with thousands of some kind of larvae. He brought us into his house, which is a dark shack extremely cluttered with rusty, damp, molding, and crusty things everywhere. Like the previous man, he receives no support from the government and angrily asserts that the government only cares about tax-generating people who work for large businesses. The rest, like him, are nothing more than animals to the government. Yet while he believes that the government looks down on him, he as well looks down with racism at the indigenous people of this village, calling them "indios salvages", savage indians, who have nothing better to do than go out and hunt wild animals. While we were trying to ask him about things like water contamination, he just couldn't stop telling us about how these "indians" are sabotaging his farm by poisoning his pigs and stealing his fish. He also sees them regularly going out to hunt birds, anteaters, and even Oncillas, a rare and threatened feline.
The place I have just described is actually part of an ecological reserve. If you have never lived in Latin America, you may not realize the disturbing lack of law enforcement there. It is not uncommon, I've found, for natural reserves to be heavily developed, deforested, and exploited. Three of the five people we interviewed didn't even know of the reserve they were living in. While declaring a forest a State Park in the U.S. may be enough to save it and its wildlife from destruction, I am starting to understand why it will not in Mexico. In countries like Mexico, it is more important than ever to collaborate with local communities to come up with solutions that benefit both people and nature. Otherwise neither will succeed in the long run.
This seems like an extremely hard thing to do. While I do believe that nature is essential to people, it's hard at times to see how to make the two work together. Granted, I have interviewed very small number of people, but most of them have seemed far too focused on their worries to ever care about nature. I don't know how to describe it exactly, but as soon as I look one of these people in the eye and began to listen to them, it feels overwhelmingly impossible to try to get them to care about nature. They just have too much else to worry about.
Which is why I wanted to work with kids. Even in these villages, they are generally happy and outgoing. It was quite a curveball to realize that I'm not going to work with them as much as I thought I would this summer, but I am learning to make the most of this as a learning experience. The biggest change is that for at least half of the summer I will be just learning, instead of teaching and learning. But the things I'm learning are extremely important to my future in conservation. I have learned that rural people will not trust people like politicians who do not understand them. For that reason I am happy to continue working in Dzununcam while learning about the common issues in rural Latin America firsthand, in addition to gathering information in order to solve these problems. Don't worry, I'm still going to try to make a plan this week to organize my own birding trips for kids next week.
In
my first week I went from the hot and buggy northwest coastal villages of El
Cuyo and Las Coloradas, to the rural Mayan village of Ek Balam, and finally ended
up in the city of Mérida. The meat of what I’ve come here to do, inspire kids
to appreciate nature, has yet to come, but in the past week I’ve had quite an
interesting appetizer. Already I am starting to see the many challenges facing
my goals, but I have also seen some of the progress that has been made and some
of the hope to come.
Sunset offshore El Cuyo
The
NGO I’m working with, Niños y Crías (NyC), has been working in the coastal
wetlands reserve Ría Lagartos Biosphere for several years to protect, monitor,
and band the American Flamingos (Phoenicopterus
ruber) that live here. Amazingly, Ría Lagartos hosts the only fully
established breeding colony in all of Mexico; the rest are in the Caribbean.
NyC has led an exemplary manner of studying and protecting these unique and
beautiful birds. Instead of importing a team of biologists to do so, they have
made every effort to include the local communities. Each summer NyC invites
local residents to help band the recently hatched flamingos for research and
trains local women to monitor and record these birds. I only got to spend one
day with some of these women, but from what I have heard this simple form of
citizen science can be a life-changing experience for them. I’ll be spending
much more time with them in July and will be sure to report more on their
experiences.
American Flamingos in Ría Lagartos Biosphere Preserve
After
my brief stay in El Cuyo, I headed off with the director of NyC, Rodrigo, to
the village of Ek Balam where I met the group of young birders there. The morning
of June 15 we went birding with the 8 teenage boys who make up the birdwatching
group there. The boys are soft-spoken and quiet, like many in Ek Balam, but
fairly skilled at identifying birds in their Mayan names. In addition to their
cultural rarity, the boys of Ek Balam are unique because they represent an
island of conservation in a sea of natural exploitation.
(Front to back) Modesto, Baltazar, and Rubén
observing a Lesser Nighthawk on its nest near Ek Balam
Ek Balam is plagued with a unique
problem: many young boys love to slaughter wild birds with slingshots,
sometimes for food but often for fun. As it turns out, many of the boys in the
group used to kill birds themselves until they attended a birding workshop
brought to the community by NyC several years ago. Not only have they learned
to appreciate the lives of birds by watching them, they also share a prolific
and honorable appreciation for all forms of nature, and some are quite
articulate at expressing it. These young men have only attended a handful of
birding workshops and yet they speak messages of conservation reminiscent of
Aldo Leopold. See for yourself:
Sadly,
their mindset is quite a rarity in their community. Many, if not most, people
there view nature as a resource to be taken for granted and exploited. In
addition to the young slingshot hunters, slash-and-burn farming and songbird
trapping are serious problems. Birds are seen as a commodity, and are
frequently trapped (especially Northern Cardinals) and sold as pets. Driving
through the fields that used to be forest around Ek Balam, I was utterly
stunned at how 300 people could use so much land. Fields of corn and charred
tree trunks are everywhere. Environmentalists in America like to guilt us by
saying that the world’s poorest consume a fraction of the resources we use,
which may be true, but the land use of the rural poor is nothing to sneeze at.
Typical burnt remains of trees in preparation of agriculture
I
am happy to say that some of the boys in Ek Balam are truly inspirational,
particularly their leader, Modesto. At the age of 17 and the height of about
5’0”, Modesto acts and appears far older than his age. With the help of Niños y
Crías, Modesto began the birding group in Ek Balam a few years ago. There is no
doubt his life has changed drastically as a result. He now has a mission, a
responsibility, a position of leadership, and a sense of purpose. What struck
me most about staying in Ek Balam was how little a sense of ambition there is
in the community. I came with the belief that people in non-Westernized
societies are free of the hurried worries that we in the West burden ourselves
with, but what I didn’t realize was how little there is to do other than work. When
I asked the group what their objective was, they didn’t understand me. The word
“objective” was alien to them. In Ek Balam I saw one single man between the age
of 20-40. They realize that there is little for them to achieve in Ek Balam, so
almost all leave for the cities to work as cheap labor. Here, drug and alcohol
abuse is common, in addition to paltry wages. Modesto and some of the others
have begun to defy this norm. Not only has birding taught Modesto to appreciate
nature and conserve resources, it has also given him a potential career path.
He is currently using his wages to attend classes to become a certified nature
guide. This initiative is rare in Ek Balam.
Baltazar, another member studying to become a certified guide
Can
birds really teach people all this, even in societies where it is unheard of?
Clearly, the boys in Ek Balam have shown that they can. However, achieving this
on a larger scale will be quite a challenge. Financial, structural, and
cultural factors often make it nearly impossible to break the norm. That is why
it is important for outside help such as NGOs to provide the materials, staff,
and knowledge to do so. I hope that I can help Niños y Crías find others like
Modesto this summer.
At
this time last year I was at a research internship in Alaska where I worked on
a statistical analysis of juvenile salmon growth and wrangled migrating
juvenile and adult salmon out of a creek for a larger study on the side. It was
truly a fantastic summer.
This
year I decided I needed to try something completely different.
I
am currently on my way to Mérida, located in the Yucatán Peninsula of México,
to spend two months taking Yucatán kids on hikes and teaching them about birds
with a local non-profit called Niños y Crías (Kids and Critters). While my research
internship last summer represented my childhood dreams of becoming a wildlife
biologist, my plans this summer represent the massive re-thinking I’ve done
this year about what my goals really are and how to achieve them.
Being
a wildlife biologist is a lot of fun. You get to travel to awesome places,
spend lots of time outdoors, and learn cool and importing things about animals.
But I’ve realized that it doesn’t fulfill the large conservation and
humanitarian concerns that are what really drive me. Research and “pure
science” alone do not satisfy me at the moment; I am interested in applied actions (which rely on research) to advance conservation on a
global scale. I’ve come to learn that this is an extremely difficult goal because
of how complicated the world is. No scientific study, research organization, or
NGO will be able to solve all the problems facing conservation. I’ve thought
about this a lot, and one of the only courses of action I can think of that can
still make a global and significant impact is education of children.
If
you sit down and analyze as many conservation problems as possible, you will
come up with many complex and interconnected factors causing each problem. But
if you go a level deeper, you will realize that at the root of every problem is
some lack of understanding, appreciation, and/or respect for the natural world.
Whether it’s a farmer who does not care about biodiversity on his land or a
corporate tycoon who values nothing but financial profit, this issue affects
countless people. I don’t mean to say that appreciation of nature is the only
cause of all conservation problems, but I believe that it lies at the root of
nearly all.
Not only can an early connection to
nature make a life-changing difference for one person, it can create a ripple
effect that affects many. By helping kids discover nature, they too may go on
to spread this care to others. For these reasons, I want to experience
firsthand the impact environmental education can have on kids. My goal this
summer is to share my enthusiasm and knowledge of nature with kids I meet by
taking them on trips with Niños y Crías and helping them become inspired by
nature.
Ok,
that’s probably the most serious I’ll be for the rest of my blog posts. Soon
I’ll be writing about the places I go, the people I meet, the wildlife we find,
and the meaningful experiences we have. Oh and don’t forget, I’ll be posting
awesome photos and videos of the people and wildlife.
Next
stop: The coastal village of El Cuyo with it’s flamingos, young birders, and
flamingo research team! ¡Hasta pronto!
