For the past week, I have been free of Internet access at the Cuerici Biological Station, a small, privately owned reserve at high elevation. The conservation area was started by Don Carlos, a farmer whose family has owned the land for generations, and seven other Costa Ricans. He has had a very interesting relationship with conservation. Don Carlos only completed second grade and then spent most of his young life making charcoal by burning off sections of the forest and hunting. This was the traditional lifestyle of many people in the region and, before the population expanded dramatically, it was reasonably sustainable. The forest and its animals had time to recover between disturbances.
Now, however, the burning is devastating for the mountainous ecosystem and families continue to burn to clear land for agriculture or scare animals out of the forest for hunting. Global climate change and habitat destruction have just exacerbated the problem by making the land hotter and drier. Don Carlos, among others in Costa Rica, realized that, although fire had been a traditional way of life, it was killing the ecosystem, threatening communities’ future livelihoods and natural beauty. So he joined with other citizens to purchase farm that his grandparents had originally worked and several hundred (?) hectares around it of remnant montane oak forest.
It’s neat because this ecosystem looks little temperate forest back home--oak trees, moss, cool temperatures, some rain clouds—but it’s also quite different as the oak leaves are smaller and un-lobed and the soil is much more fragile. The trees grow so slowly that one around little less than a meter in diameter—the size for harvesting—could easily be over a hundred years old. This makes oak forests impossible to harvest from sustainable, unless your company’s plan is looking 100 years into the future. So Cuerici is a special place because it protects a very fragile, irreplaceable ecosystem.
It is also special because part of the biological station is also a trout farm. So this is a conservation area that both uses the land and preserves it. Pretty unique in Costa Rica. Like Don Roberto (the coffee farmer from Agua Buena, whose coffee you should starting buying, hint, hint), Don Carlos cares deeply about the land and really emphasizes the one should only take what one needs. All of the students really admire and respect Don Carlos. He is a wonderful and special human being. But the trout farm is problematic; if trout escape from his land in the dry season—which is a rare event—they can devastate the aquatic ecosystem by gobbling up native species. Don Carlos and many other farmers were paid by the government to start these trout farms a decade or so ago as an economic development initiative. (Hint, hint, this is why governments need to actually listen to scientists, not special interest groups. Any ecologist would have known that introducing an aggressive species is a mistake. Just like any good scientist correlates greenhouse gases and global climate change with human-produced pollution.) So it’s complicated, but overall, I would call Cuerici a success story. Private citizens conserved a fragile ecosystem while, at the same time, providing economic opportunities for families in the community and opening the land up for local and international students.
And it was so wonderful to be cold again. I never thought that I would say that.
The next biological station is Palo Verde in Guanacaste, a heavily degraded region in Costa Rica’s northwestern corner. Most of the land has been converted to cattle ranching and, in the tropics, cattle tear up the pasture land, leading to erosion and fragmenting fragile forests. It is really sad. The bus-ride gave me even more reason to eat locally; I don’t want to contribute to a system that turns forests into eroded, tragic pastures to make hamburgers. Anyway, the station is within Palo Verde National Park that contains a gorgeous marsh and gorgeous dry tropical forest. Many of the trees, especially in the secondary forest, are deciduous in the dry season. Many trees also flower in the dry season, so some parts of the forest are exploding with gorgeous blossoms on naked trunks. There are an amazing number of large animals here. At the other sites, I mostly looked at insects and plants, but in less than 2 days at Palo Verde, I have seen a crocodile, egrets, herons, white-faced monkeys, howler monkeys, and iguanas. It’s pretty neat.
The marsh is absolutely gorgeous. It stretches out for miles to a large river and then ends at enormous mountains. It looks like a landscape from a Georgia O’Keefe painting, especially at sunset when all the light is reflecting off the marsh water. It’s home to an unbelievable number of birds of all shapes and sizes and foraging habits. Watching the marsh from the boardwalk is overwhelming. And the marsh is another interesting system because it must be actively maintained to prevent aggressive water hyacinth and cat-tails from filling in the open water and scaring away all the wonderful waterfowl. So the crew at Palo Verde has to regularly mow the area with huge tractors. They have also introduced cattle adapted to hot, marshy conditions to try to keep down the invasive species. It’s has not be terribly successful in the marsh, but they do keep down other terrestrial invasive species. So cows aren’t all bad; it just depends on the environmental context.
So it is wonderful here, even if it has been hot and sweaty. And I went on my first jog and played soccer today. It was so much fun!
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