Week 1: How Birds Changed Lives in Ek Balam

-Mérida, Mexico


More photos at www.ebarrientos.smugmug.com

            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. 

-E.B.