Hello! And welcome to this peek at our wildlife conservation work with the Macaw Recovery Network. We are the Rangers, a small but mighty group of local women who live in rural northern Costa Rica, where MRN runs a Great Green Macaw field station.
You may know that the Great Green Macaws are critically endangered – scientists estimate as few as 1,000 birds still live in the wild across six countries, including Costa Rica and our own densely forested communities. The biggest threats to their survival are the pet trade and loss of habitat, specifically the Mountain Almond Trees that Great Greens rely on for food and nesting.
After we completed the MRN pilot program a year ago that launched the Women Rangers, participant Maria Elena’s dream to become a forest engineer became the seeds of today’s MRN Women Rangers program. The Disney Conservation Fund also lent its support because of MRN’s work to protect habitats and inspire community conservation action.
Our mission? To help restore forest habitat lost to timber interests, large-scale agriculture and cattle ranching. Our goals? To become community conservation leaders, to build and manage a tree nursery in Boca Tapada and, within two years, to plant 6,000 trees and educate and involve 200 local children in Great Green Macaw biology and conservation work.
We are proud to say we expect to begin building the nursery in April on public land, with the signing of a written agreement and the blessing of the local government.
We have done the “groundwork” in the classroom and in the forests. We have worked with other MRN volunteers to monitor Great Green Macaws and their nests in the wild. (See invitation below to name a new nest!)
We completed a workshop on nursery management and reforestation planning and have taken an environmental educator’s course. We have also planted 100 trees for hands-on training in maintenance and management.
All the while, we are germinating Mountain Almond seeds in our homes and we meet each Friday with the MRN team to go over our previous week’s work and organize our tasks for the week ahead. Justina, Elvida, Lilliam and Carmen are in charge of reforestation work and will manage the nursery when it opens. Maria Elena and Yendry are our environmental educators. They are currently developing workshops for young people, ages 7 to 17.
We put ourselves wholeheartedly into the MRN race to save the Great Green Macaws, and we are proud to say we believe we are becoming the wildlife conservation leaders in our communities that MRN and the Disney Conservation Fund say are critical to the success and survival of these great birds.
Be well. Be safe. We’ll keep you posted!
As promised, here’s an invitation to name the new nest found by the MRN field team in February. It’s always encouraging to find signs of Great Green Macaws getting a start on the next generation.
MRN gives every nest a number, but the birding program also names the nests and groups them by location found, or sectors, to easily recognize them in the database. Sectors have designations, such as Stephen King books, women scientists, and tube stations.
The new nest was found in the location known in the database as tube stations. For the non-urban, non-British, a tube station is an underground train station. Currently, the nests named in this sector are all from the London tube. We invite readers to name the new nest in the name of a station from their city or country.
You can email your suggestion with the subject entry “new nest name” to communications@macawrecoverynetwork.org