By: Thibaud Aronson
Thibaud Aronson is a field ornithologist based in Peru, carrying out conservation work in the Amazonas region.
Tambopata. For anyone who knows about the Peruvian Amazon, there are few names that are more evocative. All it takes is an hour and a half flight from Lima, quickly leaving behind the parched desert of the coast, flying above snow-capped glaciers, and finally down over the rainforest that surrounds Puerto Maldonado, one of Peru’s three main Amazonian cities.
Established in the year 2000 and covering 270,000 hectares (1,000 square miles), Tambopata is one of Peru’s 17 National Reserves. This is a category within the country’s protected area systems that allows a certain degree of human activities within its borders by the local communities. These include scattered Ese Ejja Indigenous people and more recently established colonists from other parts of Peru. The reserve borders the much larger Bahuaja-Sonene National Park, which itself connects to Madidi National Park in Bolivia, where MoBot researchers have been working for many years.
Considering it’s a city of nearly a hundred thousand souls, the surroundings of Puerto Maldonado are still surprisingly wild. Macaws and poison dart frogs, some of the most common victims of human encroachment in the lowlands due to the never-ending demands of the illegal wildlife trade, can still be found only a couple minutes outside the city. Likewise, howlers and tamarin monkeys, elsewhere either hunted for food or trapped as pets, still dwell in forest patches on the city’s outskirts.
There are a few reasons for this. First of all, there is more of an ecological conscience here than in many other parts of Peru. Visions of giant river otters or flocks of parrots coming in at clay licks, both easily seen in Tambopata, are some of the most ubiquitous marketing features of Peru’s tourism board, right after Machu Picchu, of course. Indeed, there are daily flights between Cuzco and Puerto Maldonado, one of the only flight routes in the country that connects two provincial cities, instead of having to transit through Lima’s hub. As a result, ecotourism represents a substantial share of the region’s income.
Furthermore, one of the main agricultural products of Madre de Dios is the Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa, locally called castaña. This is a massive canopy tree, one of the largest in the Amazon Basin, whose fruits are still harvested in a traditional way, within concessions that preserve the existing forest where the castaña trees grow. And of course, much of the region is covered in large protected areas, which are reasonably easy to access, and therefore easier to actually monitor and protect. The Amazonian tracts in central Peru, for example, where ecotourism is essentially inexistent, have been facing much more trouble.
However, Madre de Dios is not a perfect Eden either, far from it. The city proper has only existed for a few decades, and reaching it from Cuzco used to be a journey that could take a week, navigating dubious muddy tracks that were regularly blocked by landslides. But since 2011, the city is reachable by an asphalt road, in only 10 hours from Cuzco. This is the infamous Interoceanic Highway, the only road that connects the Pacific and Atlantic shores of South America, and cuts through an immense swath of Amazonia. Years later, the Odebrecht scandal revealed that over 20 million dollars in bribes had been paid out to ensure its building, and economic studies have since demonstrated its very underwhelming contribution to the economy of either Peru or Brazil. But the damage is done.
There has since been a massive influx of migrants from the Andes, with a very different culture. They practice slash-and-burn agriculture, which regularly results in out-of-control wildfires. But the main environmental plague has been the gold rush that has been gripping the region for the past two decades. There are some 30 to 50 thousand gold miners in Madre de Dios, many of them working in illegal, small-scale operations on remote river tracts. What is left after these illegal operators move away has been described as moonscapes. And they have impacts far beyond the mining sites themselves. The mercury that is used to extract the gold seeps into the water and soils, to the tune of 50 tons per year, resulting in widespread environmental contamination and serious health issues. Furthermore, the region suffers more and more from increased crime and all the other societal ills that characterize resource-rich frontier regions undergoing rapid and poorly planned development.
Fortunately, there are people working to propose alternatives for the future of the region. For example, various NGOs, including WWF, are carrying out restoration projects on abandoned mining sites, in some cases working with the miners themselves. Limiting heavy metal contamination, which plants can help with, is in everybody’s interest, after all.
Another notable initiative is the Hacienda Herrera. This 32-hectare (79-acre) property is located 15 minutes from the city, and reachable only by peque-peque, the narrow, motorized canoes that are the most common means of transportation on the Amazonian waterways. From the small wooden jetty, a path makes its way under massive-buttressed trees towards the buildings of the Hacienda. This land has belonged to the Herrera Segara family for 4 decades, where they used to plant various crops and raise cattle, as the regional government itself gave away cows to local people in order to “settle” the land. However, showing remarkable vision, the family realized the value of the forest they had, and decided to focus on agroforestry systems, growing avocado, orange, cocoa, banana and more, while helping the native forest recover around their crops. Ten hectares of the property (about 25 acres) are occupied by the various organic orchards, while the other 22 hectares (54 acres) are covered in tall forest, which is part of the buffer zone for the Tambopata National Reserve. Then, over 10 years ago, they partnered with CECCOT, the Tambopata Education, Science and Conservation Center, led by Dr. Ursula Valdez, a Peruvian ecologist who now teaches at the University of Washington. Together, they have developed their “forest school” philosophy.
Each year, the CECCOT organizes courses and workshops that bring people from all over the world to learn and train at the Hacienda, on topics as diverse as nature photography, bird banding, tree scaling (a highly valuable skill in research projects involving arboreal camera traps or the collection of botanical specimens, for example), and much more. In addition to foreigners, CECCOT always integrates people from local communities to give them new opportunities for training or simply to learn more about the natural heritage of their land. Many local students, but also children from orphanages and disadvantaged communities have been able to come and learn at Hacienda Herrera.
One of the main goals of the Hacienda is to offer a learning space about biodiversity conservation, but always working hand in hand with sustainable development. Dr. Valdez and her students have been carrying out a long-term study of the birds that use the Hacienda’s organic cacao orchards, and which subset they represent of the avifauna of the surrounding forest matrix. The finding that some of these “cacao birds” include antbirds, understory insectivores that notoriously are some of the first to disappear from fragmented forests, is very encouraging. Camera traps placed along the trails have registered most of Peru’s lowland mammals, including the full suite of felines and even the Short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis), one of the most elusive mammals on the continent! Sure enough, during my visit, I was lucky enough to photograph a jaguarundi crossing an orange orchard between two forest patches!
At the same time, it has also become a gorgeous space to receive visitors and tourists, with a very strong focus on sustainability. This can be seen through the solar panels that are now the main source of electricity for all buildings, the collection of rainwater and the vegetarian cuisine, using products from the Hacienda’s garden and local producers. These have been implemented over time, with the family and the CECCOT sharing costs for the improvements. Ruth and Kenny, the husband-and-wife team, run everyday business at the Hacienda and they have created a travel company that takes visitors to see other natural attractions in the area, such as the famous Sandoval Lake or the Inkaterra canopy bridges.
The grounds and trails of the Hacienda are a wonderful showcase for Amazonian biodiversity, from the bats that roost under the thatched roofs of the cabins to the massive caiman lizard that hunts water snails around the seasonal pond near the main building, to the multicolored butterflies that can be seen on flowers along the paths or on the muddy riverbanks. Meanwhile, with some 350 bird species, the Hacienda is becoming a hotspot in the booming world of birdwatching, with Peru finally starting to catch up to Ecuador and Colombia, where birds have been a powerful enginefor conservation and sustainable development.
Besides the visitors, the Herrera family is also generating positive change outside its own borders. Some of the first mammals captured on the CECCOT camera traps were neighbors carrying out timber that they’d illegally harvested from the Hacienda itself. But they slowly made inroads with them, inviting them and their children to show them what they had managed to do. The idea was to have the Hacienda be a model for sustainable living. Things such as renewable energy or clean sanitation for their homes, achieved with relatively low investments. Now some of these same neighbors are implementing agroforestry systems on their orchards and planting native trees around them, while others are opening ecolodges of their own.
Just across the river is a stark reminder of how things could have gone, with the regular wildfires, illegal land grabs and health problems. On Hacienda Herrera’s side, people seem to finally have agreed that they want to try something else. Not long ago, when there was a problem with a roaming jaguar snatching dogs from people’s backyards, the neighbors got together. With help from experts at the San Diego Zoo, they agreed to a monitoring program, instead of sending a hunting party. After all, the jaguar, or otorongo, is the most emblematic species of the Amazon, even for Peruvians who aren’t of Indigenous descent. They summed it up in one sentence: “Do we want to be the community that kills our jaguar, or the community that protects him?”
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