Earthsky Interviews
Private: Coffee plantations and forest birds can coexist – with help
06-03-2007 - Biodiversity
His findings, published in the April 2007 issue of “Conservation Biology”:http://www.conbio.org/Publications/ConsBio/, suggest that humans and birds may be able to successfully coexist if farmers leave small reserves of forest, or even single trees interspersed throughout agricultural land.
“Even though we would like to have big national parks with a lot of forest, sometimes you can’t have that.” Sekercioglu said. “When you have to have agriculture, it’s really important to have these reserves of native trees and native forests, which can support large numbers of native birds and other organisms.”
The study was conducted in Costa Rica, where most of the forested terrain has been converted to open coffee plantations or pasture.
To learn how birds have adapted to life outside their native habitat, Sekercioglu and his team set up a comprehensive bird-banding and radio-tracking system to monitor the birds throughout the day.
The research team hung “mist nets”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mist_net in the coffee plantations to capture a large sample of birds. Then, they tagged each bird, and used false-eyelash glue to attached a radio-transmitter. The team tagged and tracked 156 birds during the 8-month study.
“We had a Pathfinder packed with 10 people and gear,” he recalled. “A couple times we had people hanging onto the outside. It’s lot of fun.”
One day during the study, a team member tracked a slow-moving radio signal to the forest floor, which was unusual because most of the bird species prefer tree branches. As the signal became louder, the researcher suddenly realized it was coming from a bushmaster, the deadliest snake in Latin America. The 15-foot snake had eaten both the bird and its radio. “It just started slithering away and the signal faded,” Sekercioglu said.
The researchers concluded that many tropical forest birds tend to avoid coffee plantations.
The coffee plant is not native to Costa Rica, and local birds have not evolved to eat the fruit or to live among the open fields of the plantations.
“Although we caught all these birds in coffee, Sekercioglu said, “most of them prefer remnant forest fragments, individual trees and trees along rivers, which are called riparian corridors.”
“These small patches of trees are critical for these native birds,” he said.
The good news, Sekercioglu said, is the “even though they didn’t spend a lot of time in coffee plants themselves, they did fine in a coffee-dominated landscape, as long as there were some trees around.”
Sekercioglu is optimistic about the implications of his findings for endangered bird species. “Even modest restoration efforts to increase tree land cover can help these birds more than you would think,” he said.
That seems an easy enough solution. I’m sure having those forest birds around help people in some way too!
I think it’s lovely when we learn to help nature along …
That’s the same sort of thing that just went on with the lost whales … people helped, in a gentle way.
I visited Costa Rica last March. I remember seeing Cecropia (trumpet trees) intermixed with the coffee trees. I believe (though I am by no means sure of this) the Cecropia served to both to shade the coffee trees and to eliminate the need for pesticides. If memory serves, somehow the sloth and red fire ants that lived in the Cecropia trees kept the pests at bay. I presume Cecropia provides some habitat for birds, too.
Bruce McClure
It’s only the animals that can fit in with us humans that are going to makes it. new species will evolve, but a sure bet is that a heck of lot of animal species will not make it. we may not like the idea if it means that beauiful tigers or birds are gone, but that is what the survival of the fittest.