I am writing to ask our key supporters for urgent assistance to help preserve a critical area of rainforest in Costa Rica.

Without intervention, the rapid decline in local species such as the Bellbird will continue.

The Bellbird Biological Corridor

We would like to assist our partner organisation, the Monteverde Conservation League (MCL), with an immediate opportunity to acquire an ecologically critical area of land in the Monteverde region.

MCL already owns and manages the First International Children’s Rainforest, or Bosque Eterno de los Ninos (BEN). This is Costa Rica’s largest private reserve of 22,500 hectares, mostly purchased with funds from the International Children’s Rainforest Charity network over 20 years.

This new addition would be a key part of a larger project to preserve a forested area, to be known as the Bellbird Biological Corridor, which will link the Children’s Eternal Forest? across the Continental Divide to the Gulf of Nicoya on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.

Why your support is important

This area is vital for the survival of many spectacular tropical birds, animals and insects that need to migrate annually from the rainforest on top of the Continental Divide to the food sources available at lower elevations.

Without these forests further down they simply starve. Yet Monteverde’s Pacific slope, with little of its unique forest type represented elsewhere in Costa Rica, is under significant pressure from development for tourism and commercial purposes. Already, some of the Corridor will need significant regeneration.

Many species are under threat, but the most spectacular of these are the Three-Wattled Bellbird, the Resplendent Quetzal and the Tapir.

Populations of the two bird species are declining rapidly. The forest corridor would provide them with an area rich in wild avocado trees, the fruit of which is their principal food source. In return, they spread the avocado seeds, essential for forest regeneration.

An investment for the future

The Bellbird Biological Corridor is a significant project that will require the purchase of many small areas of land to complete the 10,000 hectare territory to be protected.

A number have already been acquired and MCL now has the opportunity to add another 1,300 hectares in 18 sections.

To do so, MCL needs funds immediately. Any donations you make will go directly towards the purchase fund.

Please consider helping us in this endeavour, which will substantially progress the creation and protection of the Bellbird Corridor and the fragile life within – it needs and deserves our support.

Yours sincerely,

Robin Jolliffe (Chairperson)

Find out more about The Monteverde Conservation League in this short movie.

We asked Dan Janzen, President of the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund, how they identify the people who currently own the rainforest that they purchase for conservation. See what he has to say.

The land purchases (more than 300 in the history of the formation of ACG, and see the GDFCF site for the specific example of Rincon Rainforest) are extremely varied in their nature and ownerships. The owners range from original frontier colonists to middle-class absentee landlords to wealthy corporations to foreign investors, and about every imaginable combination and in-between. They all have one trait – they are happy to sell their land for something approximating market value in order to buy something ‘better’ – land, store, delivery truck, investment bonds, vacation in Europe, relative support, and about everything else you can think of. This move “up” is their personal evaluation of their situation.

Another variable that has been important has been the occasional case, usually with long-time resident families, of “I am happy to sell it for inclusion in a national park” (with the silent implication of I would not sell it to a developer or THAT neighbor).

The actual process of land purchase is sociologically complex, but boils down to what any neighbor does if he wants to buy the neighbors farm. You talk, think, discuss, offer, counteroffer, etc. for weeks to months to years, and in the end, it is commonplace for the fund transfer to be in portions (because ACG and GDFCF does not have enough donor funds to buy the entire property outright) and to allow 6 months to a year for removal of livestock resident on parts of the property.

Almost always we purchase an entire property, because the person has long since moved off the land and simply wishes to cash in and use the funds elsewhere. All properties purchased are surveyed (for area and location), titled, and registered in the national land register, and owned by the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (a US and Costa Rican registered charity) until passed as a “finished” ACG Sector to the government (in the meantime they are managed jointly by GDFCF and ACG).

As for what appear to be high land prices, one has to remember that Costa Rica, for all its low financial resources, very much approximates a developed country in terms of goods, services, health, education, government stability, and land ownership. Ask yourself what a hectare of old growth forest on private land a two hour drive from an international airport in UK or California would cost, and then the Sector A land prices are bargain basement (and climbing yet more rapidly as agro-industry becomes the major competitor and yet another road is paved).

But with this greater cost also comes enormously greater social stability for the purchase and its permanent incorporation into national park status. In those countries where tropical forest can still be purchased for a quarter to half the cost of Sector A lands, the management and stress costs, both in dollars and sweat equity, will have to yet be paid over the years to come. In Costa Rica they have already been paid.

So how do people come to own large tracts of rainforest?

If the owner is international, they bought it from a Costa Rican, almost invariably. The Costa Rican who owns it today bought it from someone else, and all the land around here (Rincon Forest) is owned by a historical chain containing 5-10 owners back to colonial times. ACG contains the second oldest European ranch in Costa Rica, established about 1580. Think on that date. There have been 40+ owners for Santa Rosa since then. The specific Sector A area was initially a few huge land holdings obtained by colonists in the 1800′s and early 1900′s as part of government programs for rural development, and these have gradually been fractured and sold off in parcels as they were also (often) logged or otherwise converted to agroscape, where they are now. The indigenous holdings here vaporized with the first several hundred years of European occupation.

Dan Janzen has sent us an image he has taken of a Male day-flying moth Xanthocastnia evalthe in the family Castniidae, about 2 inch wingspan.

The Sector A work is currently looking for funding to extend the forest North and protect this area of rainforest for ever.

CTF is running a campaign to raise funds for the GDFCF work. We plan to raise £50,000 to help purchase this incredibly diverse habitat. The importance of this habitat is underlined by Dans comment on the picture he sent to us.

I attach an image of a day-flying large moth that I took in May on a property 14a in Sector A. It is Xanthocastnia evalthe (Castniidae) and this is the first one I have ever seen alive.

GDFCF have identified the owners of the land and they have all agreed to sell, we need to raise the funds to get the down payments made. Property 14a that Dan mentions above is 55 hectares and requires approximately $150,000 to purchase. You can see it in the map below.

If you you would like to help, use the donation button at the top of this page.

The Black Caiman (Melanosuchus niger) is the largest South American crocodile and the Amazon’s biggest predator. But despite its size and power it can be hunted with ease and the species has been
reduced in numbers by 99% over the last century.

The wild population is estimated to be between 25,000 and 50,000 and is restricted to slow-moving rivers, streams and lakes in rainforests and seasonally flooded savannas in the Amazon basin. It is now considered to be dependent on human conservation initiatives and occurs in the CTF UK supported reserves at Jatun Sacha in Eastern Ecuador and at Uwasu in Central Brazil.

Black Caiman, which can grow up to about 20 feet (6 meters) long, swim very well, mainly using their tails to propel themselves through the water. They are supremely adapted to aquatic life with eyes and nostrils at the top of the head. Mostly active at night, they hunt for fish, including piranhas and catfish, birds and turtles and even the largest Amazonian land animals like capybaras. Some 75 long, sharp conical teeth are used for catching prey – but not tearing it apart. They swallow their victims whole!

Females build a huge mound nest of soil and vegetation about 5 feet across and lay 50–60 eggs in each clutch. While the eggs are incubating, the females guard the nest and are dangerously aggressive at this time. The sex of the Black Caiman offspring is determined by the temperature in the nest rather than by genetics.

Black Caimans are found in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guyana and Peru with unconfirmed reports from Venezuela. In reserves where it has substantial protection, most populations appear to recover well from previous heavy hunting pressure.

Thanks to Tom Snyder for the Caiman image

Your donations closing critical rainforest gaps at Jatun Sacha. The fabulous Jatun Sacha Biological Station sits on the fringes of Amazonian Ecuador and is still being consolidated nineteen years after the first tracts of rainforest were preserved.

The 7,500 acre forest, designated in the early 1990′s as the Second World Children’s Rainforest reserve, is situated in the narrow Tropical Wet Forest Life Zone of Eastern Ecuador, where the Eastern slopes of the Andes merge into the vastness of the Amazon basin. With the help of your donations, another piece has just been fitted into this exotic jigsaw puzzle – 60 hectares (approx. 150 acres) of forest, marked on our map as Douglas Clarke’s tract.

This strip of forest has its feet on the banks of the Arajuno River, in the upper Napo River watershed, which exhibits some of the highest biodiversity counts in the world. Adjacent to Douglas Clarke’s tract is a plot of rainforest where over 246 tree species have been identified in a 1 hectare (2.5 acre) area. The Jatun Sacha Reserve count has now reached 535 bird species (more than 1 in 20 of all the species in the world!) and an astonishing 850 butterfly species. And 2,000 fungi species have been found along a one kilometre transect.

Jaguars and Mountain Lions 95 per cent of the Douglas Clarke tract is primary forest and the remainder is secondary forest of various ages. It will provide additional space for all animals, birds and other organisms that receive pressure from the road on the Northern side of the Jatun Sacha Reserve along the Napo River. It also provides important habitat for jaguars and mountain lions that occasionally cross the Arajuno River to the Jatun Sacha side for hunting.

ECUADOR

It fills an important gap on the back side of the Reserve where some of the highest quality, most diverse forest is found – and, as is clear from the map, it connects significant blocks of forest along the banks of the Arajuno River. The purchase also removes a dangerous threat to the most sensitive part of the Jatun Sacha forest.

Because of the previous owner’s eco-tourism interests, he was in partnership with the local provincial works commissioner to construct a road to his block of forest through the Jatun Sacha Reserve. Indeed, the Jatun Sacha Foundation recently had to fight the two partners all the way to the Ecuadorian Supreme Court to stop the planned road – an expensive legal fight which the Foundation eventually won.

On a broader front, the 19-year development of the Jatun Sacha Biological Station has had a very positive effect in the area, as numerous local Non-Government Organisations have developed their own private reserve initiatives along the Jatun Sacha peninsula, starting projects based on the Jatun Sacha model.

Photo credit Tambako the Jaguar

The common, or Humboldt’s, Woolly Monkey (Lagothrix lagotricha), one of the chunkiest and heaviest New World primates, lives in the rainforests of the Western Amazon river basin, including the CTF supported Reserves at Uwasu in Western Brazil and Jatun Sacha in Eastern Ecuador.

Reserves such as these are critical for the survival of these monkeys. They inhabit river edge gallery forest; palm woodland; seasonally flooded varzea and dry terra firma primary forest; and high altitude cloud forest. They prefer mature, continuous, undisturbed humid tracts – and will not live in secondary woodland which has re-grown after logging.

Covered in short, dense fur, they have large, round heads with a bare black or brown face. Their bodies are thick, with sturdy limbs, and their protruding bellies have given them the Portuguese name ‘barrigudo’ or ‘big belly’. They average 16–24 inches in length (40–60 cms), excluding their thick and prehensile tail.

They are active during the day – and gregarious – living in social groups of 10 to 70, often in company with capuchins, howlers and other species of monkeys. Rather slow moving, they generally travel on all fours, but often swing by their hands, feet and tail – or by the tail alone. On the ground, they can stand erect using their tail for support, but they are happiest in the forest mid-canopy at 7–12 metres (22–38 feet).

Their principal food is ripe fruit, supplemented by leaves, seeds and some insects. Seeds are most important early in the rainy season when ripe fruit is not readily available. Most intensively hunted Females reach maturity at 6–8 years and males any time after 5 years. Females bear single young after a 7–8 months gestation period and feed their babies for 9–12 months. The young are carried for the first month or so on the abdomen of the mother and climb onto her back after 6 weeks.

It is at this time that woolly monkeys are at their most vulnerable. They are the most intensively hunted primate species in South America – a mother normally being killed so that her infant can be sold on the pet market. Tragically, it is estimated that ten mothers are sacrificed for every live individual infant that actually reaches the market.

Groups of young woollies are very playful in the wild, while grooming is a common activity within a social group. Adult males receive the most grooming, whilst adult females are usually groomed by their juvenile daughters. Communication is by voice, facial expression and other visual behaviour and woollies can show subtle changes in mood and intention by employing a variety of expressions.

Restricted to the Western Amazon basin of Northern South America, common woolly monkeys occur in the upper Magdalena River valley in Colombia; throughout much of the upper Amazon basin of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia; in Brazil west of the Rio Negro; and in the foothills and Eastern slopes of the Andes up to 3,000 metres.

And Michael McColm considers ‘that the 3150 hectare Bilsa Biological Station continues to be the only sustainable and viable conservation initiative in the Mache-Chindul region’. The Foundation is seeking funding for forested properties within the Bilsa Boundary, which, all together, total about 250 hectares. But the 24 hectares that has just been secured by the CTF donation was the most urgent.

It is Pre-Montane Tropical Wet Forest – probably the rarest forest type in Western Ecuador with less than 1% remaining. The purchase will connect two existing important tracts of this type of forest inside the boundaries of the Bilsa Station. The forest is along the higher ridge-line of the Reserve and at this elevation provides habitat and protection for Jaguars, the exotic Long-Wattled Umbrella-bird and the rare, large and striking Banded Ground-Cuckoo as well as watershed protection for the Dogola River.

This river is one of the few in Western Ecuador still surrounded by forest habitat and protects a correspondingly high level of unique endemic fish species – species found in no other coastal river in the region.

Unique wildlife

The Bilsa Biological Station’s biodiversity credentials are certainly impeccable. Two thousand different plant species have been documented, including 30 species completely new to science. Abundant animal and bird populations indicate an intact ecosystem. To date, 24 mammal species are known to live in Bilsa, five of which are on international threatened species lists. Apart from the jaguar, these are the jaguarundi, oncilla, giant anteater and troupes of mantled howler monkeys.

More than 300 species of birds have been documented, amongst the highest totals for any Western coastal forest in Ecuador. But once again, it is the uniqueness of many of the birds which makes Bilsa so special. It is listed as a key area for the protection of birds in both the Choco and Tumbesian endemic bird areas (confined respectively to Ecuador and Colombia and Ecuador and Peru), which between them hold 96 species of birds found nowhere else in the World.

The best place to find out about the Rincon Rainforest is on Dan & Winnie Janzens website. These guys have been running the organisation who have aggregated all the donations from around the world to save this rainforest. And they have done it. 5600 hectares of endangered tropical rainforest in Costa Rica is now saved into perpetuity.

The way it works is this. Organisations like ourselves raise funds and then chose where to deploy these funds so kindly gifted to us by people like yourself! One of the projects we have given to over the years is the work Dan & Winnie do with their organisation the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (GDFCF).

GDFCF take the funds we and others raise and purchase land with it. They identify the land owners, approach them and purchase the land. They purchase the land in the Rincon Forest, just one of the many sectors in the ACG, and then turn it over to the Area Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG), a government national parks organisation. There is no overhead on the donations, neither CTF (UK) or GDFCF take any administration costs out of your donation. The fact of the matter is, every penny goes to land purchase and all the work is carried out pro bono. If you’d like to help us in some way, click the Get Involved link above!

So if Rincon Forest is saved, then what next?

North of the Rincon Forest, within the ACG, is an area designated as Sector A. Sector A is the target now. To find out more about Sector A and our appeal to raise funds, hit a Sector A tag at the bottom of this post or in the tag cloud on the right.

Explain project. The idea is that each project has a blog, managed by the project leaders on the ground.

Ideally we would have a project page explaining the project, with blogging under this.

Suggest we create a page for each project with a link to it’s blog. All blog posts for that project will be in the category under projects for that specific project name.