Predator Conservation: Endangered Species Day Edition

By assuming the liability of big cats in cattle country, conservationists can reduce human-wildlife conflict.

For three decades, the big cat conservation community assumed that jaguars were locally extinct along Nicaragua’s Pacific slope. Years of deforestation had led to serious habitat fragmentation for jaguars and their prey, most of whom rely on a healthy forest understory.

At Paso Pacifíco, we knew that jaguars were still present. Our knowledge, though, was from the locals who farmed the area. They had seen jaguar tracks and lost livestock to jaguar predation. However, local knowledge and reports from subsistence farmers are not always enough to convince the experts in the scientific community.

In 2010, a Paso Pacifico intern conducting research for his master’s thesis finally caught a jaguar on film with a camera trap he’d set up in the Paso del Istmo —a narrow isthmus separating Lake Nicaragua from the Pacific Ocean. With photographic evidence, Paso Pacifíco could secure funding to launch a jaguar conservation program. Like all of Paso Pacifíco’s programs, it included scientific research, community education, and biodiversity conservation.

First my colleagues ventured deep into the Nicaraguan wilderness to set up more camera traps. They slogged through waist-deep mud and faced spiders as big as their torsos, but they were committed to the task. Did you know that a jaguar’s markings are as unique as a human fingerprint? With more camera traps set up along the narrow isthmus between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific Ocean, our scientists could determine how many individual jaguars inhabited the corridor.

Next came community education. Concerned with protecting a threatened species considered extinct just a few months before, why would we prioritize outreach above conservation? When you’re a subsistence farmer raising cattle in a jaguar corridor, big cats are your enemy. To protect the jaguars, we needed to reduce human-wildlife conflict, so big cat biologist Miguel Ordeñana traveled throughout the region to conduct community workshops on human-jaguar coexistence.

Along Lake Nicaragua, you see greater population density as well as wetlands and rainforest —the kind of habitat you imagine a jaguar to gravitate toward. In these communities, people are generally receptive to a message of human-jaguar coexistence. More easily accessible to urban areas, it’s harder to raise cattle in this region, and easier for people in this region to get their goods to market. Jaguars don’t pose the same threat to livelihoods they do in the tropical dry forests on the Pacific side of the mountains.

In the tropical dry forests on the Pacific slope, Miguel had a less receptive audience. Here, individuals live in very remote, rural areas. Many subsistence farmers don’t own the land they live on, and they clear just enough forest to raise a few head of cattle. For these members of the community, jaguars posed a very real threat to their livelihoods. Rather understandably given the circumstances, when they shot a jaguar, it wasn’t with a camera, it was with a gun.

While many people were receptive to Miguel’s message on the importance of jaguars in the ecosystem, jaguar conservation was not their top priority. They had cattle to raise and mouths to feed. Rather than asking locals to absorb the cost of jaguar predation, Paso Pacifíco raised funds from big cat conservationists, and started a compensation program. If a jaguar attacked cattle, a farmer could call Paso Pacifíco and receive compensation for the lost cow. Knowing that jaguars don’t lead to financial devastation, farmers are less likely to kill them.

As we’ve often said at PERC, when it comes to wildlife conservation, it’s important to find a way to recognize or allocate property rights in such a way that endangered wildlife become an asset rather than a liability. By compensating farmers for lost cattle, Paso Pacifíco took partial ownership of jaguars. They didn’t claim the jaguars as their own private property, but they did assume the liability of the jaguars. In addition to paying predation fees, whenever jaguar presence is established in a community, Paso Pacifíco also offers a small financial reward to every household in the vicinity. These dispersed benefits signal that jaguar conservationists acknowledge the costs a jaguar could impose and help establish trust and good will.

This story may sound very specific to the spectactularly beautiful (yes, I’m biased) and biodiverse Paso del Istmo, but it’s a universal tale. Substitute “Yellowstone ecosystem” for “Nicaragua,” “wolves” for “jaguars,” and “Defenders of Wildlife” for “Paso Pacifíco,” and you’ve basically got the Hank Fischer story. Hank, the ultimate enviropreneur, helped ease tension between ranchers and wolf conservationists, and paved the way for wolf reintroduction in the Rocky Mountain West.

Respecting the humans involved in human-wildlife conflict goes a long way toward changing attitudes. This endangered species day, it’s important to remember the costs as well as the benefits of wildlife conservation policies and practices.

See the jaguar video clip that busted the myth. And check out this more recent video of a mother jaguar with her cub. And read Miguel’s project overview on the Urban Carnivores blog.

This originally appeared on PERC's blog.

Tequila Droughts

It’s Cinco de Mayo 2016 and across the United States, the margaritas are flowing. A proper margarita, of course, requires tequila. And a spirit can only be called tequila if it’s distilled from the sap of the Mexican blue agave, grown in the states of Jalisco or Nayarit. As with most cash crops, if you dig deep enough, you can find a good story about property rights and markets. In the case of tequila, we just need to go back fifteen years.

In 2001, The Economist reported that farmers in Mexico were guarding their blue agave plants “as if they were made of gold.” Night patrols guarded the crops at night, and at harvest time police escorted agave trucks to the distilleries. It was a standard economic tale illustrating supply and demand. Blue agave plants take at least eight years to mature. Such a long time between the planting and the return on the investment makes for especially vicious cycles of surplus and scarcity. Add property rights restrictions, market intervention, and some climate variability to the mix, and you’ve got a good PERC story about Cinco de Mayo’s key ingredient.

Back to that 2001 Economist piece:

Mexico’s old-fashioned land laws prevent the distilleries from owning farmland. Relations between the country’s agave growers and the tequila producers “have not been as brotherly as they could have been,” says Jose Angel Gonzalez, of the growers’ union. That lack of co-ordination has caused three or four supply shortages in the past four decades, he says. Poor farming methods, such as failing to rotate crops or use pesticides properly, have not helped either.

This time the shortage is acute, with production down by as much as half. A freak winter frost hit the Tequila area in 1997. Then a fungus attacked the weakened plants. Since an agave takes eight years to grow to maturity, the market will not return to balance quickly.

The shortage is especially painful because it began just as the industry was booming. Most tequila used to be cheap and rough, best swigged in one go. But in recent years distillers have taken their product upmarket. More refined brands have sold well, especially those of pure agave liquor, unblended with other alcohols. Too well, in fact: between 1995 and 1999, total tequila production nearly doubled, but that of the pure-agave varieties almost quadrupled. As a result, by 1999 the industry was using nearly three times as much agave as five years before.

Hence the tequila drought.

The solution to the drought? New forms of contracts, of course. In some instances, distillers signed purchase contracts and paid growers an up-front fee at the time of planting, providing the seed capital for the long-term investment required to grow agave for tequila. In other cases, the distillers simply leased the land to farm the agave on their own. Finding new ways to define property rights to land and crops allowed tequila entrepreneurs to meet market demand.

There was another hiccup in the agave supply chain in 2007 when the United States issued ethanol mandates. As corn prices skyrocketed, farmers torched their agave fields so they could cash in on the ethanol boom, leaving tequila companies high and dry.

Nowadays, says North Carolina State’s resident tequila scholar Sarah Bowen, the biggest tequila companies are nearly self-sufficient. Large distilleries now source 80 percent of their agave supply through contract farming, and some farm on their own lands. However, another Agave tequiliana shortage is predicted for 2018.

To meet the anticipated demand, entrepreneur-turned-farmer Mark Carlston is growing blue weber agave in California. The drought-tolerant succulent can be used to produce the popular sweetener, cattle feed, rope, and of course, an agave-based spirit. Can it be called tequila? No, it’s not grown in Jalisco or Nayarit. “Tequila will always be tequila,” Carlston told Vice. But with craft cocktails and distillers on the rise, Californians are bound to come up with something they can call their own.

Tonight, as you’re enjoying your margarita to commemorate the Battle of Puebla, you can toast the creative problem solvers who find new ways to define and allocate property rights. Be sure to tune in for Cinco de Mayo 2017, when we tie in our Native American research to explore the cultural traditions and economic drivers that gave rise to tequila and mezcal.

This photo of an agave farm in Oaxaca is submitted as evidence that distillery owners can now own farmland. Thank you cocktail expert and illustrator Dave Stolte for this dispatch from Mexico.

American Prairie Reserve

A nonprofit group works to restore and conserve grasslands biodiversity.

American Prairie Reserve. © Dennis Lingohr

On the plains of eastern Montana, the nonprofit American Prairie Reserve is creating the largest wildlife reserve in the lower 48 states. So far, the conservation group has assembled more than 300,000 acres of grasslands for protection. But the project, which began in 2001, is just getting started.

APR’s goal is to create a 3.5 million acre reserve, all of it open to the public while providing habitat for bison, badgers, bobcats, and more than 300 other wildlife species. Once complete, APR will be bigger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Teton national parks combined.

Rather than lobbying for federal or state protection, APR uses private funds to purchase land and public grazing leases, while also placing conservation easements on their deeded land. APR has ambitious fundraising goals, but they’re developing a variety of revenue streams as well.

APR provides low-cost camping opportunities as well as high-end yurt accommodations for those who want to visit “America’s Serengeti.” A partnership with Utah’s High West Distillery brings in revenue from the sale of the specially formulated American Prairie whiskeys, and Wild Sky Beef raises money for both APR and neighboring ranchers.

Wholly owned and operated by APR, Wild Sky Beef is a brand of grass-fed and finished beef distributed across the United States. Its premium prices help cover the costs of replacing barbed wire with wildlife-friendly fencing and implementing other biodiversity-focused ranching practices. The Wild Sky Beef business model is designed to “soften the boundaries” of the Reserve, increasing tolerance for wildlife on the agricultural lands around the core protected areas.

If all goes according to plan, visitors to the reserve in 2025 will see what Lewis and Clark observed in 1805: immense herds of bison, elk, deer, and antelope “feeding in one common and boundless pasture,” providing just one example of what dedicated conservationists can do when they assume responsibility for the land and wildlife they love.

For more information, including maps, biodiversity survey data, and species data, visit AmericanPrairie.org.

This originally appeared in PERC Reports, Vol. 34, No. 1, Summer 2015.

Paso Pacifico’s Thin Green Line

Turtle poachers become turtle protectors

©Paso Pacifico

For millennia, sea turtles have nested on the beaches of Central America, and for centuries, local people have harvested their eggs for food. Today, four of the sea turtle species—green, leatherback, olive ridley, and hawksbill—are considered threatened or endangered.

In Nicaragua, like most countries, it is illegal to harvest sea turtle eggs, and the country’s ministry of the environment (MARENA) has set aside a few nesting sites as national wildlife refuges. In these protected areas, Nicaragua’s park rangers are joined by armed soldiers who help patrol the beaches. Despite the military presence, poachers harvest nests under the cover of darkness and sell the eggs in the local market, where a single nest (80-120 eggs) fetches $40, nearly a month’s earnings for subsistence farmers and fishers. Given such strong financial incentives to harvest eggs, many poachers are undeterred even on the beaches with an army patrol. And neither the military nor MARENA has the capacity to protect more than a few beaches.

That’s where Paso Pacífico steps in to help. Dedicated to biodiversity conservation, the non-governmental organization employs their own rangers to protect sea turtles on beaches where no government rangers are stationed. Paso Pacífico provides conflict mediation training and dispatches unarmed rangers to patrol isolated nesting beaches. Rather than threatening would-be poachers with arrest, Paso Pacífico rangers recognize the traditional use of turtle eggs and negotiate with poachers to leave nests intact. On some beaches, peer pressure is sufficient. On other beaches, rangers make direct payments for conservation.

A steady paycheck is all it takes for some poachers to become protectors, and in fact, several of Paso Pacífico’s rangers were once poachers themselves. Paso Pacífico not only trains their own rangers to monitor sea turtles for scientific research and conservation, they now contract with hotels to train new private rangers who patrol resort beaches and educate visiting tourists. As Paso Pacífico and partners extend the thin green line farther up the coast, they’re helping hundreds of thousands of baby turtles reach the sea each year.

Note: For seven years, Wendy Purnell worked with Paso Pacífico, learning everything she knows about sea turtles from their dedicated rangers.

Further Reading:

• George Wright Forum: “Engaging Local Communities in Sea Turtle Conservation: Strategies from Nicaragua“
• Ventana Monthly: “Mission Possible“
• To learn more about Paso Pacífico’s ranger programs, visit PasoPacifico.org.

This originally appeared in PERC Reports, Vol. 34, No. 1, Summer 2015.

Pop-up Wetlands for Migratory Birds

Conservation program pays farmers to create habitat on demand

Black-necked stilts. ©iStock.com/rpbirdman

Each year, millions of migratory birds make their trek along the Pacific Flyway, an avian highway stretching from the Bering Strait to South America. Dozens of shorebird species and other waterfowl make the journey, relying on wetlands as rest stops along the way. But due to the recent drought, many of California’s wetlands have dried up.

Early this year, the Nature Conservancy unveiled a plan to create temporary wetlands for these migratory birds. The pilot program, called BirdReturns, creates habitat on demand by paying rice farmers along the flyway to flood their fields when the birds need it most.

Here’s how it works: Using satellite imagery, the conservancy determines drought conditions and groundwater availability along the birds’ migratory path. With the help of the California Rice Commission, they are able to identify farmers that might be willing to participate. But knowing when and where to pay farmers to flood their fields required a more creative approach.

For help, the conservancy turned to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Through Cornell’s eBird program, a popular crowdsourced birding project, the conservancy taps into a database with thousands of real-time observations by birdwatchers who share their sightings via smartphone. Thanks to these citizen scientists, the conservancy is able to map the flight paths of migrating birds and determine exactly when to pay farmers to flood their fields.

Using a reverse auction to gather bids for wetland creation, the conservancy knows not only where willing farmers are located, but also how much those farmers will charge to flood their fields. “You want us to grow birds like we grow rice,” one farmer said. “We know how to do that.”

In the first year alone, the program created 10,000 acres of foraging habitat for migrating dunlins, sandpipers, swans, and black-necked stilts. “It’s a new ‘Moneyball,’” Eric Hallstein, an economist with the Nature Conservancy, told the New York Times earlier this year. “We’re disrupting the conservation industry by taking a new kind of data, crunching it differently and contracting differently.”

With the program in place, bird lovers hope to see populations of migrating shorebirds more than double in the coming years.

Further Reading:

• New York Times: “Paying Farmers to Welcome Birds“
• San Fracisco Chronicle: “BirdReturns rescue program is just ducky“

This originally appeared in PERC Reports, Vol. 33, No. 2, Fall/Winter 2014.

Slowing Ships for Whales

Maritime industry protects marine mammals

©iStock.com/shaunl

The Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara provide an important migratory corridor and feeding ground for gray, blue, fin, and humpback whales. Each year, thousands of endangered whales pass through the islands as they make their annual migrations north to feed, then south again to warmer breeding waters.

The Santa Barbara channel is also frequented year-round by thousands of commercial shipping vessels headed for the busy container ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, where $100 billion of imports and exports are transported each year. Maritime traffic is vital to California’s economy, but it can be fatal for marine mammals, killing several endangered whales each year.

After 15 years of tracking satellite-tagged blue whales, researchers concluded that many of the whale fatalities were the result of collisions with cargo ships. In response, marine conservationists teamed up with the maritime industry to strike a deal. To minimize whale fatalities, ships needed to slow down as they passed through the whales’ feeding grounds.

But instead of lobbying for regulatory restrictions on shipping vessels, the conservationists opted for a different approach: simply pay cargo ships to slow down. From July through October, when the blue whales are most abundant, shipping lines are paid $2,500 per trip if their ships travel at a speed of 12 knots or slower through the channel. Although the slower speed adds about four hours to a typical voyage, maritime industry groups are supporting the pilot program.

The initiative, funded by the Santa Barbara Foundation and the Santa Barbara County Air Pollution Control District, does more than reduce the risk of whale injuries. It also reduces the emissions released by offshore vessels, improving air quality for coastal communities downwind of the shipping lanes. This is significant because ships speeding through the Santa Barbara Channel account for more than 50 percent of the area’s nitrogen oxides, the component of smog most damaging to lungs.

Ships can resume faster speeds during the offseason. But for a few months each year, the environment will win twice over. Not only will endangered whales be safer, but emissions from cargo ships will be greatly reduced.

Further Reading:

• Science: “Blue whales being struck by ships“
• LA Times: “Cargo ship plan aims to protect whales, air quality off Santa Barbara“

This originally appeared in PERC Reports Vol. 33, No. 2, Fall/Winter 2014

Pulse Flow on the Colorado

Water markets reconnect the river to the sea.

Colorado River delta enthusiasts watch as gate 11 of the Morelos Dam opens to release 34 billion gallons of water. Photo courtesy of Andrew Ayres.

For six million years, the Colorado River flowed from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Now, after its waters are diverted to quench the thirst of millions of people, cattle, and thousands of acres of crops, the river is reduced to a trickle long before it reaches the Gulf of California.

Even as demand for water is increasing, the “use-it-or-lose-it” water laws in the West make it difficult for U.S. farmers to save their surplus water. South of the Mexican border, the Colorado River disappears completely. Over the years, as more of the river was dammed and diverted, the delta dried up. Farms, towns, and wetlands faded away.

For years, Jennifer Pitt of the Environmental Defense Fund dreamed of restoring water flow to the Colorado River Basin. This spring, she helped make it happen.

Along with a coalition of government agencies, conservation organizations, and hydrologists, Pitt worked to create a one-time release of more than 34 billion gallons of water to the Colorado River delta. After brokering conservation deals upstream, buying unused water rights from Mexican farmers downstream, and even helping renegotiate an international water treaty to temporarily allow for more flexible water trading, this “pulse flow” revived the Colorado and reconnected the river to the Pacific Ocean, if only for a few days.

Restoration ecologists on both sides of the border spent a year preparing for the release. Their goal was to simulate the historical seasonal floods of the Colorado River that nurtured wetlands and spawned fisheries, supporting communities and wildlife habitat across the floodplain. On March 23, 2014, the Morelos Dam on the U.S.-Mexican border opened to let the water flow. Over the next few weeks, it crept across 90 miles of dry, sandy riverbed to the Gulf of California. Along the way, it germinated cottonwood and willow trees and prompted celebrations as people gathered on the banks to splash in the water.

The river has run dry again, but Pitt and her colleagues at the Environmental Defense Fund continue to work to harness water markets that would allow the river to flow freely as it once did.

Further Reading:

• National Geographic: “Historic ‘Pulse Flow’ Brings Water to Parched Colorado River Delta“
• NPR: “Well, I’ll Be Un-Dammed: Colorado River (Briefly) Reached The Sea“
• Outside: “The Day We Set the Colorado Free“

This originally appeared in PERC Reports, Vol. 33, No.2, Fall/Winter 2014

The Science of Character

Anyone worth her salt spends at least a little time pondering virtue and self improvement. Tiffany Shlain spent a year intensely studying character development and shares her findings in her latest Let it Ripple film, The Science of Character. A growth mindset, she finds, allows us to focus on the character strengths which can build virtue.

Questions and conversations of virtue and ethics have been going on since the dawn of man and there are many different perspectives. Two of my other favorites are James P. Owen's Cowboy Ethics, rooted in seven core values that define America, and Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Virtues, which she identifies as a system of ethics for the Age of Commerce.

Owen and McCloskey each outline seven virtues. This is unsurprising because, as McCloskey has pointed out, seven is "the number of the primary virtues according to the Western tradition from Plato through Adam Smith. Or according to the Confucian tradition since 479 BCE.... Or, when you come to think about it, according to pretty much any theory of what makes for a flourishing human life."

Shlain, however, has chosen to highlight just six virtues, and it's interesting to compare the lists to consider the overlaps and omissions.

Cowboy Ethics: Core Values

• Courage
• Optimism
• Self-reliance
• Authenticity
• Honor
• Duty
• Heart

Bourgeois Virtues

• Faith
• Hope
• Love
• Justice
• Courage
• Temperance
• Prudence

Virtues of Character

• Wisdom
• Courage
• Humanity
• Justice
• Temperance
• Transcendence

Owen's Cowboy Values sparks a great conversation about depoliticizing conversations about what it means to be American, offering a framework for finding unity and hope. McCloskey's book, The Bourgeois Virtues, is a thorough and enlightening exploration of virtue ethics. She outlines the historical origins of ethics, from the Christian and feminine virtues, to the pagan and masculine. It's a must read for anyone interested in this area of research.

For all our ponderings, though, it's nice to get practical. This is what's great about Shlain's project. By outlining the 24 possible strengths we have to focus on, she has basically come up with a roadmap to virtue. No matter your ideal grouping of ethics and core values, Shlain's constructive approach to strengthening character is useful.

Watch her eight-minute film: http://www.letitripple.org/character/

Loving the Library

Libraries have had the same function for 5,000 years, as “storehouses of exceptionally important written documents." -Paul LeClerc

Life

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

- Soren Kierkegaard

Camera Trap Tuesday: Islands in Los Angeles

I'm pleased to see my colleague featured on the Scientific American blog today:

“Is Griffith Park an island?” That’s the question that Miguel Ordeñana, a wildlife biologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles who also does field work in Nicaragua, wanted to know.

We've worked together on camera trap projects in Nicaragua, but Miguel's doing super cool work right here in LA. You can follow his work on the Urban Carnivores blog or check out Paso Pacífico's Jaguar Conservation Project. You can also visit Miguel at the Natural History Museum, where he maps wildlife and helps people understand urban wildlife.

Miguel is a wildlife biologist, big cat specialist, passionate conservationist, dedicated educator, and one of the sweetest guys I know. I hope his star continues to rise. His work is important and deserves attention.

Eight Days of Gratitude: Project WOO (Wave of Optimism)

Month #1 in Review

Eight Days of Gratitude come to an end with my 8th point of light: Project WOO (Wave of Optimism).

Those of you who've traveled extensively know that awkward time after large waves of tourists and dollars have begun pouring into a beautiful part of the world, but before all that new wealth has been invested in the kind of infrastructure which directly benefits locals. 

Filling the gap in the surfing hotspot of Gigante, Nicaragua are Lisa & Bo at Project Woo, organizing community members and voluntourists to teach English, transport kids to school, lead beach clean ups, and build a new community health center. Their initial capital campaign is over, and the roof is on the health center, but they can still use your support to buy medical supplies. 

Consider making Project WOO a beneficiary if you observe ‪#‎GivingTuesday‬ tomorrow. And don't forget the other seven organizations I've floated by you with my Thanksgivukkah wave of optimism.

This Thanksgivukkah, I've shared eight points of light in what sometimes seems to be a dark and troubled world. Read the whole series for more worthy causes to support on #GivingTuesday (or any time of year) .

#8daysofgratitude