Parks in Two Nations Team Up to Aid At-Risk Birds

In late spring, the cerulean warbler builds its nests of moss and bark in the treetops of a 15,000-acre wooded area about 60 miles north of Philadelphia.

The numbers of the tiny, bright-blue songbird have dipped as housing developments and loggers encroach on its Pocono Mountains habitat, but birders say they are more concerned about the condition of the warbler’s winter home 2,000 miles away in southern Ecuador.

Though the 200,000-acre Podocarpus National Park--its rain forest home for eight months a year--is largely undisturbed, each year the warbler finds more cattle farming taking over what was once lush woods.

“The loss of winter habitat is the biggest threat to birds of North America,” said Douglas Meyer, a spokesman for the Nature Conservancy.

The cerulean warbler and about a dozen other migratory birds of concern to biologists are at the heart of a partnership between park officials in Ecuador and Pennsylvania.

The project, arranged by the Nature Conservancy, aims to preserve birds’ dual-hemisphere habitats by encouraging officials to share advice, research and eventually ideas about how to preserve the land where their common birds live.

Similar links have been established between southern Ohio’s Edge of Appalachia park and the Programme for Belize, and Connecticut’s Devil’s Den Preserve and Jamaica’s Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park.

“If you protect only one of the areas, it is not enough to ensure their survival. You must protect both areas,” said Edilberto Romero, who is the partnership director for Programme for Belize in Belize City.

The Nature Conservancy, based in Arlington, Va., is a nonprofit land preservation group that owns or manages more than 10 million acres of wildlife preserve in the United States. In Pennsylvania it buys about 1,000 acres a year.

In the last two decades, the group has expanded overseas, working with local community groups and environmental organizations to protect more than 55 million acres in 22 countries.

In 1997, the conservancy started the Wings of the Americas program to better protect migratory birds by helping them at both ends of their journey.

The Pennsylvania-Ecuador project started this year. In Pennsylvania, the conservancy is doing bird counts, as well as more research about what makes a good habitat for the birds so members can decide what land they need to buy.

“I guess you could say that in doing this work, connections have emerged between places that may otherwise seem to be completely unconnected,” Meyer said. “In the case of the Wings program, the connection is, of course, the shared species of migratory birds.”

The conservancy’s program is targeted at fewer than 100 different birds common in the six parks. Most of the birds are not endangered but are considered at risk because they require the kind of deep interior forests that are gradually disappearing in North America in favor of smaller, fragmented woods.

Park officials expect the partnerships to help hundreds of other birds that travel between the United States and South America. About one-quarter of the 4,000 species residing in the Americas are in decline or dangerously scarce, officials say.

“The scientific data says that the time to act is now to keep them from becoming endangered. This is a more proactive approach to conservation,” ornithologist David Mehlman said.

The partnered parks are scrambling to learn more about their shared birds and exchange technical advice and experience.

For example, the Edge of Appalachia park in Ohio shares at least 52 migratory bird species with the Rio Bravo Conservation Management Area in northwest Belize, but the birds were not well documented in the Southern Hemisphere.

Since the coalition began in 1997, Ohio officials have helped Belize birders conduct better counts and surveys, and the Nature Conservancy has arranged donations of binoculars, inflatable boats and outdoor gear.

At the same time, the South American parks are ahead of their U.S. counterparts in community outreach.

In Belize, neighbors clone wild orchids for sale without killing the flowers now growing. In Ecuador, officials have set up a timber bank so limited logging can continue under park supervision to protect long-term growth in the forest.

Pennsylvania birders are especially concerned because migratory birds spend less than four months in the Poconos during their breeding season and the rest of the time in South America or en route, said Pocono Mountains program director Bud Cook. It is those Southern Hemisphere locations that are most vulnerable to devastation.

“People are going to exploit natural resources to survive, if that’s all they know,” Cook said. “So you talk about how you can develop resource-based activities [and incentives] that will keep the forest alive. And you hope it works.”