Lajoya is nearby the area this article mentions, and our season coincides with the annual hawk / raptor migration.

An Overnight Success
(After Twenty Years)

Partnerships Speed Costa Rica Hawkwatch From Zero to One Million

by Charles D. Duncan and Keith L. Bildstein Talamanca, Costa Rica, October 21, 2000

We look out from the handmade deck that serves as the hawkwatch platform. Swainson’s and Broad-winged Hawks, Turkey Vultures, and a few Mississippi Kites stream by. Two teenaged Costa Rican boys and a tall, blonde Minnesotan woman are clicking away at their counters, tabulating the migrants. They are busy; the flight is strong today. Conversation switches easily from Spanish to English and back again. Behind us, we hear BriBri, the language of the Kéköldi, the indigenous people on whose land we stand; they have built the deck for the counters. The hawkwatch is on a low hill, a few hundred feet above the blue Caribbean Sea, in view well off to our right. The narrow coastal plain in front of us, beneath this stream of raptors, is a complex mosaic: the small town of Hone Creek, the wooded hillsides of the Kéköldi Indigenous Reserve, a distant banana plantation.

By day’s end, over 50,000 raptors have been counted — as many as a full season’s count at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary (HMS), Pennsylvania, or Cape May, New Jersey. Today’s count brings the autumn total for Talamanca to a half-million, a milestone most watch sites take decades to reach. Here it has taken just seven sunburned, bleary-eyed weeks. By December, the total will stand at 1.3 million raptors counted, making this site — in its first year — one of only three places in the world to break the million-raptor mark (Veracruz, Mexico, and Eilat, Israel, are the other two.) The authors have each been here previously, but on this day, we marvel at the speed with which the Talamanca hawkwatch — the first one south of Veracruz, Mexico, to collect a full season’s data — has gone from inception to success. Bildstein visited Talamanca in the spring of 1999 in search of watch sites to study raptor migration in the tropics. At the time, he was unaware of an ongoing collaboration between Asociación ANAI, a Costa Rican environmental and development organization, and the Wings of the Americas program of The Nature Conservancy (TNC), made possible by Canon USA, Inc. With funding assistance from the Wallace Research Foundation, the TNC/ANAI project aimed to use ecotourism and local pride as incentives for maintaining the forests and traditional organic cacao farms here in the southeasternmost part of Costa Rica.

Only six months after Bildstein’s visit, the idea of a season-long count first came to life. TNC’s Duncan had assisted Pablo Porras, ANAI’s conservation ornithologist, in teaching a bird observation course to local guides-in-training. During that class, Duncan, Porras, and their students visited the Kéköldi Indigenous Reserve on October 22, 1999, where they encountered a jaw-dropper of a raptor migration, unquestionably of hemispheric significance. Hawks and vultures passed through in dizzying streams. The migrating Barn Swallows and Chimney Swifts that formed the background were, literally, innumerable. Over the next few days, as Duncan and Porras reflected on what they were seeing, a conservation strategy emerged.

The objective of the TNC/ANAI partnership had always been “community-based conservation”: developing economic and other incentives for the people of the region to conserve the forest, while raising their standard of living. In fact, ANAI has been working for environmental protection through sustainable development in Talamanca for some twenty years. Through their partnership with TNC, ANAI’s preliminary ideas about birds and the economic potential of birding tourism found the resources and support to advance. And now, given the newly discovered immensity of the raptor migration, it couldn’t have been plainer: Talamanca would become a “must-see” for any raptorphile. Moreover, there were other birds to be seen. For example, Duncan and Porras found seven species of hummingbirds — before breakfast one morning, none of them at a feeder. With careful hard work and luck, the sort of nature-based tourism that truly benefits local communities seemed within reach. There were already elements of a tourism infrastructure in place: pleasant small hotels and lodges, a variety of places to eat, and reasonable roads from San José, the Costa Rican capital. Nonetheless, many other factors were necessary to mold these basic elements so rapidly into a successful hawkwatch with so much conservation promise. The key elements have been a relatively small group of committed and hardworking individuals; a strong and focused local organization with a relationship of trust and many years of experience in the community; the collaboration of international conservation and research groups; the generosity of donor foundations; and even the power of the Internet to facilitate communication among people of shared goals and interests, regardless of their locations. Absent any of these, progress would have been much slower.

Dedication and Cooperation

Shortly after first witnessing the migration spectacle in Talamanca, ANAI’s Pablo Porras changed his plans for attending graduate school in Costa Rica. Duncan spoke with Bildstein, who found a slot for Porras in Hawk Mountain Sanctuary’s Spring 2000 class of international interns. (Initiated in the mid-1970s, the intern program annually trains eight to ten of the world’s best and brightest young raptor conservationists in the whys and wherefores of raptor conservation.) Here, Porras learned techniques for monitoring raptors along migration flyways such as the Mesoamerican Land Corridor that stretches from southern Texas to northwestern Colombia. While at HMS, Porras met HMS Education Specialist Jennifer McNicoll, herself a former intern, and invited her to lead the field crew for the hawkwatch he envisioned. Her willingness to leave a secure job for the pitiful pay, long hours, and uncertain future that the project offered matched Porras’s own dedication and vision. The nucleus of the hawkwatch was created.

ANAI’s years of experience and solid relations with the communities of Talamanca created an environment that welcomed the new watch site. Many key individuals living in this part of Costa Rica had worked with ANAI, and several, including the president of the Kéköldi Wak ka Koneke Indigenous Association, had taken the Bird Observation Course, developing enormous enthusiasm and real skills in birding as well as an understanding of conservation needs. The Kéköldi people expressed an interest in consolidating and strengthening their decade-long relationship with ANAI, with birds (especially raptors), research, and tourism being the new spark. Their land offered the best place to observe, and protect, the raptor flight, since this was the land the birds were flying over and depending on. With the ANAI/Kéköldi partnership, Piece Number Two was in place.

Know-how and Funding

Once these basic elements were secured, a wide range of other partnerships provided knowledge, equipment, and funding for the nascent Talamanca hawkwatch project. The collaborations of The Nature Conservancy and Hawk Mountain Sanctuary with ANAI are typical of the two organizations’ international efforts. Outside the United States, both rely more on strong partnerships with in-country organizations and less on direct land acquisition. TNC offered ANAI its expertise in developing ecotourism and other sustainable, environmentally friendly economic alternatives, its knowledge of ornithology and birding, and access to United States-based donor foundations. HMS offered its expertise in watch site management and connections with likeminded conservationists elsewhere in the corridor.

The Wallace Research Foundation has been a generous supporter of TNC’s bird conservation activities in Talamanca, including sponsoring several bird identification and observation courses for local people. (Indeed, foundation officer Linda Wallace-Gray and her husband, John Gray, were present for that exciting day in October 2000 when the Talamanca watch hit the half-million mark.) Birders’ Exchange, a cooperative program of Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences and ABA, responded to ANAI’s request (brokered through TNC) for binoculars and scopes for the Bird Observation Courses, and some of this equipment was pressed into service for the hawkwatch. Dimeiston Peñaranda took the course and became a key part of the hawkwatch using Birders’ Exchange binoculars. It would be hard to overestimate the importance of that course and those binoculars to Dimeiston: they have literally changed his life. From the small BriBri community of Yorkín, he is now, at age 16, a birder, in the same sense of the word as any reader of this newsletter.

The James Lynch Conservation Biology Fund, from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, provided key funds for the hawkwatch as a result of a proposal from Porras. This is exactly the sort of project that the late conservation biologist James Lynch wished to support: using biology as the basis for conservation decisions and actions, encouraging a particularly skilled native researcher in his career, and enabling the protection of one of the planet’s most impressive migrations.

International Cooperation And the Internet

One does not just wake up one day with the skills to establish a hawkwatch and count a million or so raptors in a season. Fortunately, the team at the Veracruz, Mexico, “River of Raptors” (VRR) project (itself comprising several former HMS interns) was willing to share their decade of experience. (See Clay Sutton’s article on Veracruz in the June 1999 Birding). Porras and McNicoll each visited Veracruz for discussions and training. The warmth and hospitality they enjoyed there encouraged them, and the relationship has continued through electronic mail, even to the point of sending nearly real-time updates from Veracruz on numbers of birds counted at that site as the birds headed south toward Talamanca. A decade ago, pre-Internet, such collaboration among groups in distinct Latin American countries simply would not have happened.

What’s next? The community of Carbón Dos, comprising mostly first and second-generation campesino colonists from elsewhere in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, is building a small lodge for birders. The view of the Talamanca Corridor from the porch is glorious, especially when tens of thousands of hawks are streaming by. Hawk Mountain Sanctuary and Holbrook Travel have each committed to bringing birding tourist groups to Talamanca. The Nature Conservancy’s Costa Rica Program is turning its attention slightly farther inland, toward Upper Talamanca and La Amistad National Park, to ensure the protection of the high-elevation species that live there and maintain the watershed that feeds the areas where the hawks roost in Talamanca. Spanning the border of Costa Rica and Panama, these highlands protect perhaps the largest and most diverse stand of virgin forest and highland watersheds in Central America, providing habitat for species such as Crested Eagle, Resplendent Quetzal, and Volcano Hummingbird.

Asociación ANAI and the VRR are collaborating to create the Mesoamerican Raptor Migration Corridor, a coalition of local and regional groups interested in hawk migration in Mexico and Central America, to share methodologies, successes, and conservation strategies. In short, the “overnight” success of the Talamanca hawkwatch, built on twenty years of preparation, points ahead to a most promising future.