Week 7: Introducing Birding to Las Coloradas

(See photos of Las Coloradas here, and nature photos here)

If you are someone concerned about not just environmental but also social issues such as government corruption, injustice, failing education systems, paltry job opportunities, drug violence, and struggling youth; then Mexico is a fascinating and frustrating place to work. Even if you are a strict environmentalist, you will realize that none of your goals can be accomplished without also figuring out a way to alleviate the social issues here. Although your greatest love may be the perfection and intricacy of undisturbed, nonhuman ecosystems, you can’t help but notice the social problems everywhere you go. At times you even seriously consider that industrialization and development might actually be what’s best for the overall well-being of Mexico’s life. Then you come to a place like Las Coloradas and you’re completely at a loss.

On the outside, Las Coloradas (LC) looked just like all the other coastal villages I had seen so far; dusty roads lined with square cement houses and simple convenience stores (tiendas). But there is a business here that makes LC very different from the rest: salt production. LC owes its entire existence to a sole salt company (called a salinera) that extracts white mountains of salt from the coastal wetlands of Ría Lagartos Biosphere Reserve. Essentially, LC is nothing more than a developed encampment for the salinera’s workers and their families. In this village of about 1,150 people, there are only two main professions: saltworker and fisherman, with a heavy bias towards the former. One result of this is that kids here generally have no desire to study beyond middle school. Even if a youth does have a desire to do something more than shovel salt or catch fish for the rest of his life, other opportunities are scarce in Yucatán and practically nonexistent in LC. I was also startled to learn of the unchecked domination that the salinera has over LC. Not only do they rule the job market, but they also own all the land in LC and determine who gets to use it and how. In other villages, if a man wants to build a house to start a family, he goes to the police station and they allot him a plot of land. In LC, one must ask the salinera for permission. One resident commented to me that LC is more like Cuba than Mexico. In a strange twist, capitalism has provoked socialism. The salinera has also used its power to prevent all forms of tourism, probably fearing that it may draw workers away from its currently unlimited supply. As a result, LC is considerably less aesthetic than its neighbors Rio Lagartos, San Felipe, and El Cuyo, all of which host relatively rich Mexican tourists from the cities during the summer weekends. Additionally, LC doesn’t benefit at all from the thousands of beautiful flamingos that can be seen practically from town. Instead, guides from nearby Rio Lagartos bring tourists and take back their money to their homes. Never before have I seen a community in such a stranglehold by a single company.

American Flamingos near Las Coloradas

This isn’t to say that the people of LC are wallowing in impoverished misery. There is a saying that some use to describe themselves, “Jodido pero contento.” Broke but content. Many have accepted their basic possessions and are content to live simply in peace. From an outsider’s perspective, the best way I can summarize it is that it’s possible to be content here if you don’t have great ambitions. People here are poor, but no one is starving. There’s little to do, but there’s little you’re expected to do. However, if someone had a passion for something other than salt, fish, or housekeeping, I would recommend they take the next bus out of LC.

So going back to birding, when I came into LC I wasn’t just thinking about how to teach the kids about birds, I was also trying to figure out what birding could do for them. Tourism is suppressed, so future careers as bird guides would be unlikely (although it’s not impossible for them to move). It seemed even more unlikely that their parents would send them to a university to study biology should they become impassioned to do so. At first, it seemed like there wasn’t much point in teaching them about birding, but then I asked myself, why do the rest of us bird? Because its fun. Because it’s fulfilling. And for me, observing nature gives me an outside perspective on life that helps me find and focus on what’s really important in the world. I can’t point to statistics that will suggest that birding can help these kids, but I can tell you that a fun, meaningful activity is sorely needed in a place where kids spend the majority of their time watching TV and grow up to be low-paid and often alcoholic saltworkers.

From July 20-23 I stayed on my own in LC to help start a bird club after the workshop Niños y Crías had just given. In addition to teaching kids, I also spent time with Wilma, the young woman in LC who organized the kids for the workshop, to help her lead a bird club after I leave. Let me now recount an average day in LC, quirks and all…

A typical day for me would start with being awoken around 5:15am by the roosters next door, an experience which I found to be as obnoxious as it was rustic. An hour or so later I would get up, have my breakfast of bread and a juicebox, get dressed, put on sunscreen and bugspray (let the greasiness begin) and don my binoculars and camera. I head out into the rapidly disappearing cool air.

Birding outside Las Coloradas

Outside I wait for the kids to come meet me for a bird walk, usually arriving 15 minutes late, or 15 minutes early Mexican time. We have no form of transportation other than our feet, but luckily there is a large expanse of good coastal scrub habitat and salt ponds just half a sunburn down the road. Here we usually find Tropical Mockingbirds, Tropical Kingbirds, Mexican Sheartails, and American Flamingos quietly grunting and feeding in the salt ponds. As the sun slowly starts to bake us, I help the kids work through identifying their newly discovered neighbors: “Ok so if it has a gray body, black wings, and a long black tail, then which species is it?” (I must have said this a hundred times now). The kids are somewhat quiet and reserved the first day, but continue to open up as time goes on.

Learning to use a field guide

After the walk I return to my cabin to read, edit photos, and rest for a couple of hours. Around noon I walk down the dirt road to Wilma’s grandmother’s house, or rather, cluttered area enclosed by cement blocks. I spend a while chatting with Wilma and her relatives and then get to work helping Wilma in some way prepare for starting a kid birding club. One day we went over identification of the common species in LC, on another we drafted a request for 10 binoculars and a guide to the birds of Mexico from the American Birding Association’s Birders’ Exchange. Afterwards, I return to my cabin, which is nestled between one house that sometime smells of burning excrement and another than perpetually reeks of something like burning vomit. Here awaits me the woman I have somehow managed to swoon…

Using the powers of peripheral vision, I discovered by the second day that her gaze never left me any time I was within her sight. Every afternoon and all afternoon she’s sitting at a table in the middle of the yard that I must cross, and she stares at me eagerly and indiscreetly every time I do. She’s tall and lanky like a flamingo, and has a voice strikingly similar to one as well, which she uses to blurt beautifully intelligent things like, “He just went swimming, hahahaha!” as I’m walking back to my cabin in a wet swimsuit. Let’s just say that she looks and behaves nothing like I imagine my next girlfriend will. So, on principle of course, I am obliged to resist her not-so-seductive stare whenever I return to or emerge from my shelter. In retrospect, it seems quite frivolous to write about now, but I believe her persistence merits some recognition.

Next, I get lunch at the town’s only restaurant, my only real meal of the day, consisting of grilled fish or chicken in corn tortillas. There is little you can do in LC in the afternoon heat and humidity, so I go back to my cabin and beat cool off for a couple hours more. At 4:30 I meet the kids outside to go for another bird walk. Friday’s walk was a particularly good one. This group of five loosened up more than usual and started joking around during the walk. We had great views of a perched Lesser Yellow-headed Vulture, a group of 20 Tropical Mockingbirds, and displaying Mexican Sheartails. I was thrilled to see that one girl, Asís, was becoming very enthusiastic and skilled at birding. Even after it rained on us as we ran back to town, Asís got the group to go back out and bird a little more. To my surprise, it has been the two oldest kids from the workshop who have shown the most enthusiasm towards birding. We continued our walk towards the beach, spending about 20 minutes climbing a sea grape tree like monkeys and eating the fruits. At the beach, the kids became fixated on showing me the shells and spent the next 15 minutes tirelessly bringing me every single type they could find. My hands overfilled with shells, the sun set, and we walked back to town.

Photoshoot on our Friday bird walk

Spending four nights in LC was one of the most wholesome experiences I’ve had in Latin America. I lived more simply than I have in years. I shared as much of my knowledge as I could, but of course learned far more. There is now a group of 10-15 kids in LC eager to keep birding. In a place like LC, who knows what kind of impact this interest could have on their community if they continue it? But as I have already mentioned, we will not get to find out unless the bird club can find some binoculars to use. We will be sending a request to the Birders’ Exchange soon, but I will conclude this blog post by asking, sincerely, if anyone can help provide binoculars to the kids in Las Coloradas. My email is emb326@cornell.edu.

Week 6: Bird Class!

-Las Coloradas

Have you ever spent a day in a small boat bouncing among the waves, and then suddenly experienced that exact same feeling as you lay in bed that night? Well, last Thursday night I had a similar sensation, except this time with sound. As I lay falling asleep in my hammock, I suddenly started hearing a dozen young voices calling my name in little Mexican accents, “Ehvan! Ehvan! Ehhhvan! EHVAN!” I opened my eyes and the voices stopped. It had been a long day with the kids in Las Coloradas, but a good one.

This week I helped Niños y Crías give a birding workshop to a group of about 16 kids between the ages of 8-12 in the small coastal village of Las Coloradas. Starting on the morning of July 18, we began a series of games, PowerPoint presentations, crafts, and of course, bird walks. I helped by leading three bird walks, teaching the group how to use binoculars, giving a presentation on the identification of ten common bird species, and leading activities about habitat and reproduction adapted from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s BirdSleuth program. The complete agenda of what we did is below:

Wednesday

·      “Map of Sounds” activity: Kids went outside and closed eyes and listened for five minutes. Came back inside and drew what they heard.

·      Presentation: Origin and Evolution of Birds

·      Presentation: The Importance of Birds and Identifying Them

·      Activity: Draw a bird, something it eats, and where it lives

·      Learning the body parts of a bird via PowerPoint, song, and “Pin the Part on the Bird” game

·      How to use binoculars via PowerPoint and practice with targets

·      Rules and ethics for watching/treating birds via PowerPoint and charades

·      “The Secret Trail”: Practicing observation by walking a small part of a trail and trying to find objects that were placed there.

·      Presentation: “10 Common Birds of Las Coloradas”

·      Bird walk to along beach and through coastal scrub habitat

·      List of birds seen

Thursday

·      Bird walk in coastal scrub habitat

·      Bird list and identification

·      Activity: Draw a bird seen on the walk

·      Craft: Bird Mobiles

·      Trip to the salt ponds to see flamingos and shorebirds

·      Bird list

Friday

·      Review of what we learned so far

·      Presentation: What is Habitat?

·      Activity: The Four Components of Habitat (BirdSleuth)

·      Game: Tag Your Habitat! (BirdSleuth)

·      Presentation: Migration

·      Game: Migration Adventure

·      Activity: The 6 Chapters of Reproduction (BirdSleuth)

·      Activity: True or False? (BirdSleuth)

·      Closing ceremony and certificates

While it may have taken a while to get this part of the summer, it was well worth the wait. The days were long and full, and for the first time this summer I had a regular schedule (for two days) and a scarcity of free time. But for the first time in my life I could go to sleep each night knowing that I had probably made the world a little bit better. Although I have been told that kids from the coastal villages can be wild, rude, and reckless, we were lucky to have an excellent group of well-behaved and enthusiastic kids. Of course, the level of interest varied from kid to kid. What you have to remember is that this is a place where there isn’t even tourism, where the idea of watching birds for fun isn’t quirky or dorky; it’s completely alien. To have even one or two kids interested in continuing birding after the workshop would be a success. Instead, we got sixteen. 

I made a change of plans Thursday and decided to stay in Las Coloradas an extra three nights to help Wilma, the local woman who organized the kids, establish a birding club in Las Coloradas. This weekend I am taking kids on various bird walks in the nearby coastal scrub habitat, teaching Wilma lots about bird identification so that she can lead the kids in the future, and helping Wilma solicit a donation for 12 binoculars from the American Birding Association’s Birders’ Exchange program. I guess you could call this the culmination of my work here this summer.

A couple times in the past I’ve gotten letters in the mail asking me to donate old supplies or money to the Birders’ Exchange. I confess that I declined these requests thinking that I was giving enough with my annual memberships to organizations like World Wildlife Fund and National Audubon Society. How mistaken I was. I can sincerely tell you that any money or equipment you donate the Exchange will make an extremely beneficial difference and is sorely needed. I cannot stress enough how badly Yucatán and probably the rest of Latin America lacks basic birding equipment like field guides and binoculars. As far as I know, there is simply no place to buy these here, even if the average person could afford them. I have tried to emphasize in this blog the importance of teaching kids about nature in order to achieve effective conservation in places like Mexico where regulations are often ineffective. One of the best ways to do this is by introducing them to birding, as birds are abundant and relatively easy to see. Obviously, this cannot happen without binoculars. If you sincerely care about preserving nature and spreading a conservation ethic in Latin America, please make a donation to the Birders’ Exchange here.

Week 5: Challenges

It suddenly hit me this week how challenging this experience has been. The problem is, it's hard to walk into an NGO and expect them to have a job set aside for you. It hit me recently that every single week so far I have been nothing more than an observer. There has been no work I was actually needed for. The only exception was the class in El Cuyo I gave two weeks ago. Fortunately, the rest of this week actually does have an exciting plan involving a kid bird workshop in Las Coloradas and a flamingo festival in San Felipe, but the two remaining weeks thereafter are a complete mystery.


The idea of local conservation in one's own community is something that is starting to interest me a lot more. I won't lie, a good part of my interest in working in Latin America started with simple desire for adventure and exotic wildlife (don't get me wrong, there's a LOT if urgent conservation issues that I want to fix in Latin America). But one of the most important things I've learned from this experience abroad is the undeniable connection and advantage one has to working in one's own community. While my two homes, Wisconsin and New York, are certainly less exotic than places like the Yucatán Peninsula, they are places that I care deeply about and am much better connected to. Additionally, the conservation work there seems much more organized. Perhaps I over-estimated my ability to make a difference abroad at such a young age (20, in case that isn't clear). Perhaps it would be more productive at my age to be working where I am already somewhat established and connected. Later, if I am still interested in working abroad, I could apply the experience I would have gained at home to help me overcome the organizational challenges of working in 'Third World' countires. And there's nothing inferior about local work. Educating kids in the US may be even more important than in Mexcio because American kids are likely to consume much more resources than the poor kids in the villages I'm seeing. That's just a thought, but it's critical to recognize that US commercialization and globalization plays a huge role in driving and perpetuating the environmentally-degrading practices in Latin America. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that I'm starting to realize that some of the most important conservation issues are found in my own homeland.

You're probably thinking that I should be focused more on how I can make the most out of my time while I am here in Yucatán. I am too. There are certainly possibilities, it's just a question of whether they can reasonably happen. I need to find out if certain people are available, if I'll have a place to stay, if there is a group of kids interested, etc. One idea I have would be to help a young woman named Wilma in Las Coloradas start a birding club after we give the workshop this week. So I guess my only choice is to head to San Felipe with NyC this afternoon, talk to Wilma and the NyC staff as soon as possible, and try to work out the details in the next couple days. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

-E.B.

Week 4: Teaching (and learning)

“Evans! There’s a tern over there!”

“Señor, my binoculars don’t focus.”

Me: “Here, Alvaro, you need to turn the-”

“Evans! Evans! Evans! Ev-”

Me: “Qué?!”

“There’s a tern flying over there!”

Me: “Ah nice job, Ismael! How did you know it was a tern and not a gull? Jared, don’t go so far!”

“Its beak is orange.”

Me: “Right! And what color is the beak on-”

(Tug on arm) “Evan, I’m scared that it’s going to rain”

Me: “ Ok, Monce, we’ll head back soon. Ismael! Why are your binoculars covered in sand?!”

“Jared pushed me!”

Our first bird walk on the beach

Thus went my first bird walk with seven children in El Cuyo last Wednesday. After my last-minute plan to return to the sleepy village on the north coast of the Yucatán Peninsula to give my first bird class to a group of kids, my trip became quite a bit more interesting. I spent the week preparing for classes, teaching the kids as much as I could about birds, and doing a lot of learning on my feet.

On our way to go birding

The class I gave was great in some ways and not so great it others. The not-so-great part was its organization, which was pretty hard to work with at times due to logistics out of my control. The great parts were that at least a few kids got a kick out of watching birds for the first time and that I learned a LOT about how to better organize a class. Unfortunately, Chucho, the man who leads the two kid birding groups in El Cuyo and who was going to help me lead the class, had to go out of town several times that week because of the government elections, including on the first day. Consequently, only three of the six kids he had invited showed up to the first class. We talked a bit about birds and went to the beach to look at some Brown Pelicans, Double-crested Cormorants, Royal Terns, Laughing Gulls, and a Black-bellied Plover.

Birding with Chucho and the kids

Things weren't too much better the second day. After setting up the classroom, I waited for almost an hour before the kids started arriving. I had been expecting six, but nine showed up, and a dog. While the six kids who were originally invited already had a year of experience with birds, the three new ones had absolutely none. The class' age ranged from 5 to 11 years old, and I struggled a lot that day to give an organized, entertaining, and educational class to such a mixed group of kids. There were a lot of things I had forgotten about how kids act. For one thing, they don’t seem to understand that you simply cannot listen to two, three, or even four of them talking at a time. I did manage to teach them some groups of birds and the basic parts of birds that day, and at the end Chucho and I took six of them birding outside of El Cuyo, were we saw Black-capped Tityra, White-collared Seedeater, Northern Jacana, and other birds.

Birding outside of El Cuyo

After two days of mediocre activities and enthusiasm, it was time for me to step things up. Fortunately, by the third day I started to get a better sense of how to control a group of energetic kids and keep a class moving. The number of kids also lowered to about 7, which was a relief. I think a couple of the original six dropped out, but it was encouraging to see that all three of the kids new to birding had returned with enthusiasm. I started the class by listing some of the birds from the day before and helping them find them in the field guide, which the kids really enjoyed. I had also realized that it was important that I myself had concrete teaching goals for the day. Through a few games and activities, some adapted from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s BirdSleuth curriculum, the kids were able to list and explain the four main components of habitat and order the six steps of reproduction by the end of the day. We concluded by birding for a while on the beach, seeing mostly the same birds as the day before. For some, like Mario, this was an opportunity to employ his birding experience by finding Ruddy Ground-Doves for the group in the beach vegetation. For others, like Yalila, this was their very first time going outside with the purpose of finding and watching birds with binoculars. One of the most gratifying moments of the class for me was when Yalila turned around and excitedly pointed out the Brown Pelican that had just dove into the ocean. We all got great looks at a Golden-fronted Woodpecker pecking for insects on a wood fence, and I was amazed when the next day Alvaro, five years old and the youngest in the class, fluently repeated its name (carpintero frentidorado) and what we had seen it doing. In the last class we played another entertaining game about habitat, did a migration obstacle course, and habitat treasure hunt. I concluded the class with a bird walk to the other side of the village and a splash in the water.

Exploring La Ría on a bird walk

As I stepped out of the car full of kids after our last birding field trip and said my goodbye, they started chanting, "Que no se vaya! Que no se vaya!" We don't want him to go! I knew then that as crazy of a class as it had been, I had made positive impact. Trying to organize a class in a rural village can be quite a challenge as I discovered. People generally have an extremely relaxed sense of punctuality and obligation, especially the kids. Classes are likely to start an hour late, kids may decide not to come one day, or they may invite friends to the next class. On the other hand, there is a startling amount of enthusiasm towards birds. Maybe it's because there's so little else to do in these small villages, but I've found that the kids here are way more excited to start birding than I've seen in the U.S. In El Cuyo and several other villages I have heard stories of how kids rallied together to form birding groups after a Niños y Crías workshop. While I may have gone into this class overestimating an 8 year old’s ability to articulate deep thoughts on conservation, Chucho explained to me before I left some of the exciting ripple effects teaching kids about birds he's already seen. Take a look at the video I put together of the highlights of the class as well as a part of my interview with Chucho:

 See all the photos of the class here, and nature photos from El Cuyo here.