Category: Saving Nature Collection

Frequently Asked Questions About Carbon Offsets

Offest Your Carbon Footprint by Planting Trees

July 10, 2019

Frequently Asked
Questions About
Carbon Offsets

Welcome to our Frequently Asked Questions page about using a carbon footprint calculator and carbon offsets! 

Here, we aim to address common queries regarding carbon offsetting, a crucial tool in combating climate change. Whether you’re new to the concept or looking to deepen your understanding, this guide is designed to provide clarity on how carbon offsets work, their impact, and how they can be utilized to reduce your carbon footprint. If you’ve used a carbon footprint calculator and are wondering how to offset your carbon footprint, you’ve come to the right place. Read on to explore answers to the most pressing questions surrounding carbon offsets.

1. What are carbon offsets?

We all produce carbon as a result of using fossil fuels directly, or indirectly when we use products that were produced using fossil fuels. For example, we directly produce carbon when we drive a car or take a flight. When you eat food that has been produced with artificial fertilizers and pesticides (which are made from oil) you are indirectly producing carbon. The amount of carbon you produce is your “carbon footprint.” On average, each US consumer produces about 26 tons of carbon dioxide per year. (That’s 7 tons of carbon.)

Carbon offsets are a way to compensate for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by funding projects that reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere. An offset works by engaging in an activity that does the opposite. Instead of producing carbon, you do something to absorb carbon.

Luckily, plants are very good at this. Whenever you plant something, the plant will be absorbing carbon that would otherwise remain in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.

Professor Pimm, Saving Nature’s Founder and President, likes to lead an exemplary, energy efficient life, except he flies a hundred thousand miles a year or more. So, using our carbon calculator for flight emissions, he determines how many tree to plant to offset his carbon emissions from flying.  For example, a return flight to Rio de Janeiro puts about 1 ton of carbon dioxide into the air, per person. That’s about $4 worth — much less than a week’s supply of the coffee he drinks. (Biodiversity friendly, fair trade, organic, of course.)

Louie Psihoyos, Oscar-winning director, asked Pimm to be in his documentary Racing Extinction. Pimm’s condition was that there would be a donation to offset the film’s carbon emissions. Psihoyos and his team made a very detailed calculation. It came to close to what Pimm had suggested on the simple basis of how many people worked for how many months and how many flights they took. After all that, Psihoyos felt that the donation was so small, he gave several times the calculated amount, for which we were very grateful. If you wait until the very end of the documentary, you will see it paid for trees planted at Jama Coaque, Ecuador.

2. How do carbon offsets help reduce emissions?

By investing in carbon offset projects, individuals and organizations can effectively counterbalance their own carbon emissions. For example, if you take a flight and calculate your carbon footprint using a carbon footprint calculator, you can then purchase carbon offsets to “offset” the emissions from your flight.

3. How do I offset my carbon footprint?

To offset your carbon footprint, you can calculate the emissions from your activities using a carbon footprint calculator and then purchase carbon offsets from reputable providers. These offsets fund projects that reduce or remove an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere.

4. Should I use a carbon footprint calculator to work out my annual carbon emissions?

Carbon calculators are a great way to estimate your annual carbon emissions. Our carbon footprint calculator is based on the EPA estimates for carbon emissions. We also help determine how many trees to plant to offset your carbon footprint with a donation to Saving Nature.

Check our our carbon footprint calculator.

5. How does donating to Saving Nature offset my carbon footprint?

At Saving Nature, we’re keen to slow the extinction rate and, in the process, we plant a lot of trees that offset carbon emissions. When you donate to Saving Nature, we channel funds to turn degraded cattle pastures into forests. As the forests regrow on the land we help acquire, they sequester about 26 tons of carbon dioxide (7 tons of carbon) per hectare per year. This sequestration rate continues for about 20 years, then continues, but at a slower rate. 

Therefore, over 20 years,we estimate that each hectare we acquire sequesters at least 540 tons of carbon dioxide (140 tons of carbon). We make deals to purchase and restore land at under $2,000 per hectare, so we are recovering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at about $4 per ton. (Most of our deals are much cheaper than that. For the ones that are more expensive, we seek help from foundations).

6. Is Saving Nature’s carbon certified?

This is the question we get most from companies. There are certified carbon offsets and that allows them to be traded. Now, certification is a good idea. It creates a product that companies can trade because everyone trusts those who do the certification. We are working to certify our carbon credits in Colombia.

7. What are the scientific facts about global warming?

First, the emissions. Global carbon emissions are about 10 billion tons of carbon per year. That goes into the atmosphere as 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide — a greenhouse gas. That’s about 1.5 tons of carbon (5.5 tons of carbon dioxide), per person per year, but rich countries emit far more than poor ones. 

Deforestation — of which the burning of tropical forests is the major component —contributes about 10% of those emissions. Some tropical countries have much higher carbon emissions than one might expect from their industrial activities.  

8. How much carbon is there in forests and how much do forests sequester when we replant them?

A recent study by Saatchi et al. maps current estimates of how much biomass there is in forests.The units on the map are in megagrams, which is a ton — and the measure is of biomass.  About half of biomass is carbon.  In most of the places where Saving Nature restores forests, there’s a minimum of 300 tons of biomass or 150 tons of carbon per hectare.

Graph

These are the areas shown in orange or red. (One Saving Nature site is in dry forest and the amount is less.)  A variety of other papers show averages above 200 tons of carbon per hectare, especially in the wettest forests.  As luck would have it, there is a detailed study done, in part, at one of the key Saving Nature sites: La Mesenia in Colombia. (Not luck, really: when one protects forests, one provides a place for scientists to work!) Gilroy et al. show that the primary forest there had 200 tons of carbon per hectare.

This study also shows something else. The forests go from about 10 tons of carbon per hectare as pastures to about 100 tons in about twenty years — so an average of about 4.5 tons per year, but higher in the first decade than the second.  It’s much harder to study the change in forest biomass than just the biomass — one needs several measurements, of course. 

A recent paper by Poorter et. al.1 is a massive compilation of the available estimates, by dozens of people who work in this field. They presented many graphs comparable to the one by Gilroy et al. and concluded that over twenty years, recovering forests sequestered an average of 3 tons of carbon per year. Wetter sites accumulated carbon faster than dry ones. Their results predict that the places where Saving Nature has its projects would accumulate 150 to 200 tons of biomass (so 75 to 100 tons of carbon) in 20 years, so at just under 4 to about 5 tons of carbon per year  Interestingly, they showed a median time of 66 years to reach 90% of the carbon in old forests — a result broadly comparable with the graph above.

So, our land purchases are indeed the gift that keeps giving and giving. In our calculations, we’ve used a higher annual rate of carbon sequestration, but a much shorter period over which the carbon accumulates. 

9. Can you explain carbon math?

Well, yes, if you insist. The bad news is that different publications use different units.  We use metric tons of carbon. Some publications talk about carbon, some about carbon dioxide, and some don’t tell you which. A ton of carbon becomes 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide when you burn it. (That’s because the molecular weight of carbon is 12 and carbon dioxide is 44: 44/12 = 3.67.)  And some studies use biomass. About half the biomass of wood is carbon.

We use hectares, 100 metres by 100 metres, and 1 hectare is roughly 2.5 acres. There are 100 hectares to a square kilometre. Some publications use hectares, some square kilometres, but worst of all,  the Food and Agriculture organisation uses 1,000 hectares — or 10 square kilometres.

As if this wasn’t bad enough! Some studies use tons, while others use megagrams. A megagram is, well, a ton. And after all that you will be relieved to know that one Imperial ton is almost the same as a metric done (1 ton = 1.02 metric tons). We’re using metric tons.  The worst news of all is that many studies don’t say what they are using! (It can take an age to find out what they actually mean.)

10. How can I teach the carbon cycle to high school students?

Teaching children about the carbon cycle doesn’t have to be confusing. Once they understand the relationship between trees and climate change, they can be climate change ambassadors to friends and family.

Contact Professor Pimm for details of his presentation to High Schools on how to estimate how much carbon there is in a forest. 

11. What can I do to fight climate change?

Calculating and offsetting your carbon footprint by planting trees to restore rainforests is a great way to take personal responsibility climate change. The next step is knowing how many trees to plant to offset your carbon footprint. Our carbon footprint calculator will help you do both. 

Donating to Saving Nature to plant trees to offset carbon dioxide and rescue biodiversity solves the two most pressing environmental problems the world faces—mass species extinction and deforestation—at the same time!  We will continue to use both science and savvy to connect, protect, and restore forest corridors. We invite you to join us in this ambitious effort! 

Please support forest restoration and connectivity, and share our hope for the future of species struggling for survival in the face of global warming!

Footnotes

1. Poorter L, Bongers F, Aide TM, Zambrano AM, Balvanera P, Becknell JM, Boukili V, Brancalion PH, Broadbent EN, Chazdon RL, Craven D. Biomass resilience of Neotropical secondary forests. Nature. 2016 530:211 2.

FIGURE 1: Map of carbon in tropical forests: from Saatchi SS, Harris NL, Brown S, Lefsky M, Mitchard ET, Salas W, Zutta BR, Buermann W, Lewis SL, Hagen S, Petrova S. Benchmark map of forest carbon stocks in tropical regions across three continents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2011 Jun 14;108(24):9899-904. 3.

FIGURE 2: Accumulation of carbon in regenerating tropical forests. From Gilroy JJ, Woodcock P, Edwards FA, Wheeler C, Baptiste BL, Uribe CA, Haugaasen T, Edwards DP. Cheap carbon and biodiversity cobenefits from forest regeneration in a hotspot of endemism. Nature Climate Change. 2014 Jun;4(6):503.

Categories: Carbon Offsets, Climate Change, Saving Nature Collection

Making Habitats Whole Again

Stuart Pimm, Founder and President of Saving Nature

January 14, 2019:  Stuart Pimm sat down with Ella Barnett to reflect on the Tyler Prize and its role in his conservation vision for SavingSpecies. 

 

He has since launched Saving Nature in July 2019 as the successor to SavingSpecies.  His new organization reflects his now broader vision for working toward a sustainable future to solidify and amplify the gains achieved.  Saving Nature has recruited an expanded team of leading conservation professionals  to help shape the strategic direction for saving vanishing ecosystems, preventing extinctions, and improving the lives of communities most impacted by environmental degradation.

 

Dr. Stuart Pimm, the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, is a founding father of modern conservation. A trained biologist and theoretical ecologist, he has used his multidisciplinary background in the application of understanding biological conservation. It is because of him that science was implemented into conservation and species population, and extinction rates started to be tracked. In 2010, Pimm was awarded the Tyler Prize for his extraordinary contribution to the environment. Now, eight years on, the Tyler Prize sat down with him to find out what Pimm has been working on since. Unsurprisingly, his unfailing dedication towards the environment in general – and conservation in particular – has crafted a path towards a rapidly expanding non-profit organisation that aims to restore international species populations while working at a local level.

 

How did the Tyler Prize help you to contribute to the environment?

I was incredibly fortunate to get the Tyler Prize, and I felt that one of the things that I could do with that money was to use it to create an organization, SavingSpecies. It’s an organization to try and look at what are the key places around the world that we need to protect if we’re going to save biological diversity, biodiversity. The money I received from the Tyler Prize has certainly helped me push that agenda.

 

What does SavingSpecies do?

SavingSpecies, identifies the critical parts of the world where species are going extinct, through finding local partners. We want to empower local conservation groups, and we help them raise money to do restoration of habitats, typically forest restoration.

 

We solicit proposals from people in developing countries that want to manage their land by reconnecting these fragmented landscapes. We get proposals from people, and then we try to raise the money from donors, and convince them that it’s a really cost effective way of preventing species extinction.

 

We work with local partners to acquire unproductive land, get rid of the cattle, and replant those areas in native trees, establishing habitat connections. In doing that, we also are able to provide a source of income for local communities.

 

How does SavingSpecies generate impact?

What we do is reconnect forests by building what we call habitat corridors.

 

We have a mapping site, which maps out the key places in the world where species are at risk, and then we know from lots of detailed scientific studies the consequences of fragmented habitats. We’ve done a huge amount of research that shows that small, isolated fragments of habitat lose species and so we’re in the business of re-connecting landscapes to make them viable for species.

 

We also want to empower local conservation groups by helping them raise money to restore habitats. I wanted to build an organization that would help them, that would reward them, that would give them the resources and the scientific capability that they need. Moreover, you can see our results from space. You can go to Google Earth, and you can see the landscapes that we have reconnected with our tree planting.

 

Where are SavingSpecies’ projects?

We currently have ten projects in six countries. We have projects in the Andes. There’s Colombia and Ecuador, in the Coastal Forest of Brazil, and in places like Sumatra…

 

The site we work in Sumatra is the only place that has elephants, rhinos, tigers and orangutans in the same place. It’s a big patch of forest, but there’s a deep gash into that forest where agriculture has spread along the valley. But elephants and other species want to cross from one patch of forest to another which causes a lot of damage to local people. So we’re creating a forest corridor so that the elephants and other species can move between those patches safely and not bother people; they have freedom to roam.

 

What do you believe is the best practice for conservation?

Conservation is always local.

 

The people who live in these areas have lived there for generations. Their lives are there. What we can do is to work with them in a respectful way and see if we can help them make different choices for their lives.

 

Having local partners solves a lot of problems because they understand the local issues. There’s no way I could go into those places and tell those people what to do. What I can do is help local groups. I can empower local groups so they can solve the problems.

 

Solving problems is not always easy, but they are idiosyncratic. A problem one part of the world has will be dffierent to a problem in another. It’s always local, and you’ve got to work with people who understand the local politics.

 

When I look at local, small local conservation groups around the world, I’m hugely impressed by them. These are not famous organizations. These are small, local groups of people. They’re often very passionate about the places where they live and the places that they care about.

 

What is the scientific process that you follow?

We’re working on scientific papers now to try and identify exactly where the places in the world are that have not been protected properly, places that are the priorities for establishing national parks and other protected areas. Now that work will take me a year or a couple of years to finish with my team. We’ll then publish a paper. That will probably take another year, and it might be several years beyond that before we can make practical actions from that.

 

When you finally get to that act of planting a tree, it’s enormously rewarding.

It’s that continuum from really rather esoteric, sometimes rather theoretical science, through to the empirical science, through to the practical applications of that science, right down to planting a tree. Some of the things that I’m doing now are consequences of science that I did a decade ago.

 

We are very energetic at using our science to make a difference.

 

Do you ever plant the trees yourself?

Oh, you bet. I think that’s the part I like the most.

Help Us Plant Trees

Help us make habitat whole again by restoring and protecting vanishing ecosystems.

Categories: News, Saving Nature Collection, Science

Horned Marsupial Frog Rediscovered in Ecuador

Marsupial Horned Frog, recently rediscovered in Ecuador's Tumbes-Choco biodiversity hotspot
Marsupial Horned Frog, recently rediscovered in Ecuador's Tumbes-Choco biodiversity hotspot

December 4, 2018

 

HORNED MARSUPIAL FROG REDISCOVERED IN ECUADOR

There is nothing more rewarding than learning that a species thought to be extinct has managed to somehow survive against formidable odds. The horned marsupial frog (Gastrotheca cornuta) is one such species.

Horned marsupial frogs are unique among amphibians. Named for the leaf-like horns on the top of their head and for the pouch on the female’s back to gestate tadpoles, they live in the rainforest canopy. The male’s call, like the pop of a champagne cork, celebrates the mating season. Males fertilize eggs externally and place them in the female’s pouch. Here the developing tadpoles, with umbrella-like gills, eventually emerge as tiny frogs, without a having free-swimming phase.

Once having ranged from Costa Rica to Ecuador, their numbers have steadily dwindled as their habitat has been polluted and destroyed by commercial interests. Finally disappearing from sight in Ecuador in 2005, this reclusive amphibian was presumed to have succumbed to deforestation, the lethal chytrid fungus, agricultural pesticides, and crop fumigation.

It turns out that we haven’t lost them yet. A small population of horned marsupial frogs was able to survive in a remote area of the Choco rainforest. A team of scientists recently discovered six individuals and heard more vocalizing on a parcel of land our local partner acquire earlier this year. As the research continues, we hope to learn more about these survivors, as well as other isolated species taking refuge here.

The property is now protected as part of our broader vision to prevent large-scale commercial logging and oil palm plantations from intruding farther into what remains of this richly diverse tropical forest.

Western Ecuador ranks among the most threatened biodiversity hotspots in the world. The most threatened habitat is the lowland Chocó rainforest, which almost rivals the Amazon in terms of biodiversity but far surpasses it in terms of endemism and of course deforestation. The Chocó has more endemic birds than any other region in the world; it also harbors >2,250 endemic species of plants.

Having already lost nearly 98 percent of the original forest, the Ecuadorian Choco is facing the highest rate of deforestation in the country. We are currently developing an ambitious strategy to establish a mosaic of strictly protected reserves by building wildlife corridors that connect, protect, and restore disjointed forests.

Help Protect Their Home

Help us save the last 2% of the Ecuadorian Choco for the horned marsupial frog and thousands of other endemic species.

Categories: Amphibians, Ecuador, News, Saving Nature Collection

Saving Nature In China

November 20, 2018

by Stuart Pimm

Saving Nature in China

I’ve just spent three weeks in China — my second visit this year. It’s part of an overall commitment to conserving China’s biodiversity that now accounts for a month to six weeks every year of my time.

Why China?

Well, in large part it’s because China is so important for its exceptional biodiversity. China holds 15% of the world’s vertebrate and 12% of its plant species. Its ecosystems range from permanent ice fields to tropical moist forests. Importantly, it is becoming an international leader.

The International Convention of Biological Diversity’s Aichi targets specify quantitative targets for areas protected (target 11), stopping loss of natural habitats (target 5), and the extinction of threatened species (target 12), while underscoring the vital importance of the ecosystem services natural ecosystems provide (target 14). In 2020, China will host the Convention’s 15th Conference of Parties. Under President Xi, improving the environment has become a national priority.

China is also looking outward, to developing infrastructure across Asia and particularly Southeast Asia. One of my reasons for being in China was to attend a conference, organised in part by Professor Binbin Li, a former Ph.D student of mine and now an assistant professor at Duke University Kunshan.

Binbin and I have published key papers on identifying which areas of China are important for biodiversity. In particular, we have examined to what extent protecting giant pandas protects other species and also what places are important for species across Southeast Asia (Saving Nature Vice President, Dr. Clinton Jenkins, was a co-author of the latter paper, too.) There’s a lot we can do as conservation professionals to help our Chinese colleagues. I have seven papers in giant pandas (and many others on other issues) because I’ve been able to help with analyses and structuring conservation work using skills and experiences I’ve developed elsewhere.

Is there an Important Role for Saving Nature in All This?

Well, yes, but it’s a distant vision. The Saving Nature model helps local conservation groups buy and restore land to reconnect isolated landscapes. We take this approach because almost all the key places for threatened species are in fragmented landscapes. It’s a niche, of course, but one we fill very successfully. We can’t buy land in China, but the model of reconnecting habitat fragments applies there as is does elsewhere. So, we’re talking with our Professor Li and other colleagues about how to apply our approaches there.

Finally, mitigating the effects of the infrastructure projects of the Belt and Road Initiative will require understanding where these projects intersect key areas for biodiversity. Identifying them — and looking for ways to minimise their harm to biodiversity— has to be a first step. So, no, we aren’t building habitat corridors in China yet. But keep watching this space.

Categories: China, Saving Nature Collection

Lessons in Camera Trapping

Camera Trap photo fo Crab Eating Fox

October 26, 2018

by Bridgette Keane

LESSONS IN CAMERA TRAPPING

As a student at Duke University, I worked with Dr. Stuart Pimm during the spring to plan a trip to monitor protected areas in Ecuador and Colombia that his organization is working to connect and restore. As part of the “camera trap team,” I spent a semester familiarizing myself with the use of camera traps for conservation work. This involved skimming dozens of scientific articles and reviewing different camera trap models from outdoor retail websites.

Once I arrived in the field, I realized that you can only learn so much from websites and articles. I was lucky to have received advice from Dr. Jim Sanderson about how to set-up camera traps. His guidance helped reduce the amount of troubleshooting we needed to conduct in the field.

We visited two project locations, starting with the Jama Coaque Reserve, run by the Third Millennium Alliance. We then travelled to La Mesenia in the Colombian Western Andes, run the The Hummingbird Conservancy for our second installation.

Camera Trap photo fo Crab Eating Fox
Bridgette Keane Camera Trapping
Bridgette Keane considers camera trap settings

Navigating the Owner’s Manual

We spent the first few days at Jama Coaque placing traps on nearby trails to evaluate various camera settings. Basic recording options included pictures, videos, or both – but there was so much more to consider. 

Other settings included image/video format and size, LED control (how many LEDs you want to go o for night images), motion sensor level (how sensitive you want the sensor to be set to), and the time interval between pictures (how long you want the camera to wait before it takes another picture/video if it is being triggered many times in a row).

Setting Our Traps

Once we actually started positioning cameras in the field, I quickly discovered that there was much more to think about than just the camera settings, as Jim Sanderson had warned me. First of all, I was not familiar with the reserve. I came in with an idea of a placement pattern for monitoring the corridor. Once there, I realized that placing the traps depended much more on the trails and in some cases, security issues.

 

I had to do my best to crawl my way through game trails, scouting locations in the path of animals, but away from people. I carried a machete to clear any vines or branches along the trails near the camera. Anything moving in the wind in front of the camera may inadvertently trigger it.

Finding the right spot was just one of the many challenges to placing camera traps. My days in the field usually involved hiking for hours up steep hillsides to a predetermined GPS location. Once there, I spent another hour finding the right tree, clearing the area, and positioning the camera. (Picture me jamming sticks behind it to get the perfect angle and checking the line of sight by squatting in front of it, resulting in some wonderful photos).

Unexpected Discoveries

As we learned the in’s and out’s of camera trapping, we start rethinking the technology’s possibilities. In the short-term we simply wanted to understand what species are using wildlife corridors in various stages of renewal. For the Jama Coaque Reserve, it was especially important to monitor areas of forest that were newly restored. 

We were beyond thrilled to find ample movement of various species through very young forest in just the two weeks that we spent at the site. The most surprising and exciting discovery was a video of an ocelot moving through forest that was open cattle pasture just a few years ago.

Our two week stay at the reserve at La Mesenia, Colombia was even more challenging from a terrain perspective. The hikes were steeper, longer, and much more treacherous. They often took an entire day and needed to be planned out with and led by one of the reserve’s local rangers. In the short time we had at the reserve, it was simply too difficult to check them. However, our partners will be checking the cameras regularly to make sure they are running properly and will hopefully find some quality videos!

 

A View From the Canopy

For long-term research, the camera trapping project in Jama Coaque will next extend into the canopy. The idea is to record pictures and videos of animals that rarely come down to the ground. The research team will also pair each canopy trap with one on the ground. This protocol for corridor monitoring transcends the typical limits of camera traps by expanding camera placement to include a vertical dimension. As a result, we’ll have a more complete picture of how the entire forest is being used.

 

Ongoing Research

The team in La Mesenia is also shaping a long-term plan to monitor species moving through the corridor. As we collect date over the long-term, we will better understand what species use the corridors as they mature. These insights will help conservation scientists understand how to best reverse the dynamics of forest fragmentation and help species have access to the resources they need.

Support Our Research

Please support our research into the science of wildlife corridors and species recovery.  Your support helps mentor young scientists.

Categories: Camera Trapping, Ecuador, Research, Saving Nature Collection

How Can I Teach High School Students the Carbon Cycle?

arbon_Cycle-animated_forest

September 14, 2018

Stuart Pimm

Teaching children about the carbon cycle doesn’t have to be confusing. Once they understand the relationship between trees and climate change, they can be climate change ambassadors to friends and family. Here’s an exercise that Saving Nature’s President Stuart Pimm does with high school students.

HOW CAN I TEACH MY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT THE CARBON CYCLE?

Because it’s a science class, Pimm starts with two key facts. He’ll be talking about tons of carbon — and burning one ton of carbon produces 3.7 tons of carbon dioxide. Second, he’ll be using the metric system.  

How much does a tree weigh?

No one answers.  

“Imagine a tree as a cylinder. The volume of a cylinder is its area — that’s pi r squared” — the class groans — “times its length” — more groans. But that’s the hard part.  

Quickly, students estimate that a good-sized tree in the forests of eastern North America has a diameter of about one metre (so about three feet) and maybe ten metres (about thirty feet) tall. The volume comes to 7.85 cubic metres.  

How heavy is wood is easy!” Pimm tells them.  

Pimm reminds them of Archimedes and bath tubs.  

“Put a stick in water, keep it upright, and notice that about 70% of it is underwater. That’s the specific gravity of wood.”

A cubic metre of water weighs a ton, so the tree weighs about 70% of that, and 70% of 7.85 is 5.5 tons. 

arbon_Cycle-animated_forest

How much of wood is carbon? 

“Well weigh a piece, dry it, then burn it: the carbon has burned off as carbon dioxide.” 

The answer is that wood is about half carbon — and so that one tree is 2.75 tons of carbon.  

The class goes outside and measures how many trees of different sizes there are in an area of forest. Trees are not perfect cylinders, of course, but this simple exercise teaches some basic algebra and physics — which high school teachers love, even as their students groan. It also gets the students excited about how to improve the estimates, including how to estimate the height of a tree. (Simple algebra too, using the tool on the iPhone that estimates angles.) 

Scaling up one tree to estimate carbon emissions from deforestation 

The class comes back inside. There are good data online that show how much forests shrink each year. Look at satellite images on Google Earth that show that many forests are being cleared by burning them.  

In an afternoon’s class, one can get sensible, if rough, estimates of the planet’s most important land-use change and of how much it contributes to the increase in the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  

Certainly, these exercises make other important points. To do them correctly, one needs to spend a lot of effort in a lot of places to estimate the full range of values expected and how they vary across Earth’s different ecosystems. (The methods suggested here wouldn’t work well outside of Phoenix, Arizona, for example.)

 

When one has those values, then scientists can work out how best to predict them — from data obtained from satellite imagery, for example. Green places in the Eastern USA have more carbon than the desert southwest. But no satellite can save the hot, steamy, hard work of measuring trees! That’s fundamental

Putting Knowledge into Action

At Saving Nature, our work to reforest areas high in biodiversity solves two most pressing environmental problems the world faces—mass species extinction and global warming—at the same time!

 

We invite you to join us in this ambitious effort!  Donating to Saving Nature puts trees in the ground for biodiversity, and sequesters carbon from the atmosphere. 

Girl on Train Tracks analogy for Climate Change
Categories: Climate Change, Saving Nature Collection, Science Corner

Protecting 20% of Land to Save Two-Thirds of Plant Species

September 5, 2013

You’ve heard the adage, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” But new research by Saving Nature scientists offers an amazing conservation ‘deal’. Backed up by top-flight science and data, it’s too good to pass up. So what is the deal? The new paper, published today in Science, was co-authored by Saving Nature founder Stuart Pimm and Vice President Clinton Jenkins, and by Lucas Joppa of Microsoft Research, who completed his Ph.D. with Pimm. 

PROTECTING A FIFTH OF THE WORLD'S LAND TO SAVE TWO-THIRDS OF ALL PLANT SPECIES

The key finding of the paper is that protecting a fifth of the world’s land area will save two-thirds of the world’s endemic plant species. Using the Kew Gardens plant database, the authors looked at the geographical distributions of 110,000 plant species. From this analysis, the researchers identified the smallest set of regions that contain the largest number of plant species.

They discovered that nearly two-thirds of the world’s plants occur in just 17 percent of the world’s land. The bad news is that less than a sixth of that 17 percent is currently protected. “Our study identifies regions of importance. The logical – and very challenging – next step will be to make tactical local decisions within those regions to secure the most critical land for conservation.” Pimm said.

Map by Clinton Jenkins illustrates endemic plant density is concentrated in only 17% of the planet’s land area.

Incorporating years of data, Jenkins created a detailed, color-coded map of Earth. The map illustrates where endemic plants are concentrated. This information helps conservation ecologists, policy makers, and economists to prioritize locations for conservation eorts. Because of ecological food webs, protecting endemic plants not only helps save rare plant species—it helps save dependent species, such as specialist herbivores, epiphytes and so on. “We also mapped small-ranged birds, mammals and amphibians, and found that they are broadly in the same places we show to be priorities for plants,” said Jenkins. “So preserving these lands for plants will benefit many animals, too,” he said.

According to Pimm, to achieve biodiversity conservation goals, the world needs to protect more land than we currently do and much more in key places such as Madagascar, Colombia, and coastal Brazil. These are all places where Saving Nature works. 

Saving Nature relies on cutting-edge science to make its conservation decisions. With the limited amount of conservation funding available, we must use the best science to maximize the number of threatened species of wildlife and plants we can save. The report’s findings truly oer conservationists a great deal.

SCIENTIFIC NOTE: The work in Science focused on endemic species of plants. Endemic species exist only in specific places, such as a particular mountain range or forest. Endemic species are typically very rare, because of their limited geographical distribution. Endemic plants are also crucial to ecosystems that support other endangered species and, more broadly, biodiversity. Because they exist only in one place, endemic plants are often hosts for other endemic species that depend on them—insects, animals, and even other plants such as epiphytes.

Categories: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Research, Saving Nature Collection, Science, Science Corner, Sumatra

Data Shows Limited Recovery for Hawaiian Sea Turtle

Two green turtles basking. Courtesy Mark Sully, NOAA/NMFS Hawaii Monk Seal Research Program. Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
Two green turtles basking. Courtesy Mark Sully, NOAA/NMFS Hawaii Monk Seal Research Program. Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
Two green turtles basking. Courtesy Mark Sully, NOAA/NMFS Hawaii Monk Seal Research Program. Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

May 26, 2013

By Stuart Pimm

Historical Data Suggests Hawaiian Sea Turtle Recovery is Limited

Hawaii is famous for its tranquil beaches, surfing, and for pairing pineapple with pizza. But it is Hawaii’s green sea turtles that are one of the most popular tourist draws today. 

Hundreds of thousands of tourists trek to Oahu’s North Shore every year to see these creatures haul out of the ocean to bask on the sand under the tropical sun. 

The turtles seem so numerous today it is easy to forget that only a few decades ago most feared their extinction. The population had been harvested for food – like fish – by local residents and for a commercial fishery that targeted turtles. All harvests were banned in 1978, however, and surveys by NOAA scientists have documented a steady increase in nesting at one rookery ever since.

As a result of this rebound, some have called for the species to be removed from federal protection, de-listed as a threatened species, and for harvests to reopen.

A new study published in the journal Ecography, however, demonstrates that 80% of the historically major nesting sites for the population are extirpated or dramatically reduced and shows how this concentrates the risks posed by climate change. 

The authors of this synthesis represented a diverse collaboration of ecologists, geographers, and historians – in what’s become known as the discipline of historical ecology.

Dr. van Houtan, an outstanding young scientist, who last year, was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, by President Obama, for his work on turtles.
Dr. van Houtan, an outstanding young scientist, who last year, was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, by President Obama, for his work on turtles.
Green turtle and monk seal harvest on Laysan Island, unspecified date, courtesy State of Hawaii
Green turtle and monk seal harvest on Laysan Island, unspecified date, courtesy State of Hawaii

Historical ecology is deceivingly simple.

Modern scientific data are chronologically limited, forcing scientists to look at proxies such as ice cores, sediments, or tree rings for long-term data sets. In historical ecology, researchers mine historical records for any information on the abundance, distribution, or demographics of wild populations. 

Art, restaurant menus, ethnography, newspaper articles, and naval journals have all shown to be rich sources of information for species as diverse as Atlantic cod, African rhinos – and Hawaiian sea turtles.

I think most ecologists are fascinated by the idea of historical ecology. Who wouldn’t want to travel centuries back in time and see wild nature?” said study author Dr. Kyle Van Houtan, who leads NOAA’s Marine Turtle Assessment Program, based in Honolulu. 

The question with historical observations has always been how they might be organized to inform conservation management today.” 

Gaining Insights Before Exploitation

To answer that question, Dr. Van Houtan and his team scoured historical information in a host of museums, libraries, and Internet databases like Google Books and Project Gutenberg. They were rewarded with hundreds of historical accounts of sea turtles in Hawaii.

In Hawaii today, more than 90% of the green turtles nest on a low-lying coral atoll in the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. However the study found nesting was significant and widespread across Hawaii, even a major nesting area on the island of Lanai that was hunted to oblivion shortly after World War I.

This historical perspective this study provides is important then for context for the recent decades. Many species on the U.S. Endangered Species Act were listed there in the 1970s, when their populations were at all-time historical low points. 

According to Dr. Van Houtan, “the unprecedented modern population bottlenecks probably are not the basis for setting recovery targets, healthy populations are. This is where historical data are useful – to give insights before exploitation.”

Figure from the paper showing modern and historical data on green turtles.
Figure from the paper showing modern and historical data on green turtles.

 

The study appeared this week in the Early View at the journal Ecography. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0587.2013.00245.x/abstract

Categories: Hawaii, Research, Saving Nature Collection, Science

Oil and Gas Can Coexist with a Thriving Amazon

A tanker waits to pick up oil

May 16, 2013

by Stuart Pimm

Oil and Gas Development Does Not have to Destroy the Amazon

When one thinks of the Amazon, it is usually of lush rainforests or indigenous people living amongst a wild landscape. Certainly, that is part of the Amazon’s story, but there is more, some of which may be a surprise. There is a good chance that the Amazon also produced the gasoline that powered your car today. The vast forest holds not just biological and cultural riches, but also hydrocarbon riches. The font line of the conflict between a wilderness wonderland and the modern petrochemical age is the western Amazon, one of the most biologically and culturally diverse zones on Earth.

A Framework of Best Practices for Hydrocarbon Development in the Amazon

Now a new scientific study by NGS grantees Clinton Jenkins and Matt Finer, along with engineering expert Bill Powers of E-Tech International, proposes a 10-point framework of best-practices for hydrocarbon development in the Amazon. 

By combining advanced engineering criteria with consideration of ecological and social concerns, they present solutions for reducing the many potential impacts of hydrocarbon development.

For example, by using extended reach drilling (ERD), a technique to reach a larger subsurface area from a single drilling location, it is possible to greatly reduce the total number of needed drilling platforms as well as access roads for a given project, says Clinton Jenkins of North Carolina State University. 

Using ERD along with other key components of best practice, such as reduced pipeline right-of-way and a prohibition on new access roads, could reduce project-related deforestation by more than 75 percent.

NGS Grantee, Dr. Clinton Jenkins stands amid felled trees in Peru. Logging is a
NGS Grantee, Dr. Clinton Jenkins stands amid felled trees in Peru. Logging is a familiar threat to the Amazon, but not the only one.
A tanker waits to pick up oil
A tanker waits to pick up oil

Avoiding Conflicts

According to Clinton Jenkins, it is not just better engineering that can prevent problems. The vast majority of currently planned drilling wells, production platforms and pipeline routes overlap sensitive areas such as protected areas, indigenous territories, critical ecosystems and vital watersheds. By identifying these types of potentially conflictive overlaps early in the planning process, best practice can be essential to avoiding future conflicts.

While the findings in this study will be applicable across the Amazon, the direct focus is the department of Loreto, a vast Amazonian region in northern Peru that is home to extraordinary biological and cultural diversity. Loreto recently made headlines when the Peruvian government declared an environmental state of emergency following years of extensive oil contamination.

In the words of author Dr. Matt Finer of the Center for International Environmental Law, 

Loreto makes an ideal case study because it is one of the largest and most dynamic hydrocarbon zones in the Amazon. Following the state of emergency, there is an added urgency to develop methods to minimize the impacts of any future development.”

The study also concludes that utilizing best practices should not increase project costs and may actually be cheaper in the long run. According to author Bill Powers of E-Tech International, “The engineering section of the guidelines addresses the full range of key project components. In addition to greatly reducing negative impacts such as deforestation, we found that best practice does not impose substantially greater costs than a conventional project, and may in fact reduce overall costs.”

Click here for the
Open Access Study

The research was funded in part by the National Geographic Society.

Categories: Peru, Research, Saving Nature Collection, Science

The Search for the Grey-winged cotinga

Clinton Jenkins produced this extraordinary map. It shows the State of Rio de Janeiro — the city itself is to the left of the large bay at the western end of the image. Satellite images have been draped over a 3-D rendering of the mountains. Finally, Clinton colour-coded the areas with forest high enough to be possible habitat for the grey-winged cotinga. It was known from only two sites — those labelled. Surely, we could find it in some of the other possibilities show in light blue!

May 30, 2011

by Stuart Pimm

Not all National Geographic expeditions go smoothly.

All adventures end at precisely the same point. Thirty seconds into the hot shower, a stream of dirty water runs down the drain. It takes with it the mud and dried blood, changing skin color from blotchy grey to pink, uncovers the until-now forgotten scrapes and cuts, and exterminates the thriving ecosystem of bacteria and fungi, each with its own distinct and pungent smell, to which my skin had been playing host.

This is exactly when one has the first dangerous notion that the last days or weeks might have been fun.

This expedition to remote and unexplored Brazilian mountaintops to lookfor one of the world’s rarest birds was born in my comfortable, air-conditioned laboratory. Professor Maria Alice dos Santos Alves of the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and I are sitting in front of a large computer monitor. On screen is a satellite image of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Overlaying other information, the computer tells us is that one of the biologically richest areas of the planet has been barely explored.

Someone has to go — not “because it’s there” — but precisely because in short order it may not be. This is one of the most damaged and threatened ecosystems on Earth. Within days, Maria Alice prepares her grant proposal to the National Geographic Society’s Committee on Research and Exploration.

Clinton Jenkins produced this extraordinary map. It shows the State of Rio de Janeiro — the city itself is to the left of the large bay at the western end of the image. Satellite images have been draped over a 3-D rendering of the mountains. Finally, Clinton colour-coded the areas with forest high enough to be possible habitat for the grey-winged cotinga. It was known from only two sites — those labelled. Surely, we could find it in some of the other possibilities show in light blue!
Clinton Jenkins produced this extraordinary map. It shows the State of Rio de Janeiro — the city itself is to the left of the large bay at the western end of the image. Satellite images have been draped over a 3-D rendering of the mountains. Finally, Clinton colour-coded the areas with forest high enough to be possible habitat for the grey-winged cotinga. It was known from only two sites — those labelled. Surely, we could find it in some of the other possibilities show in light blue!

Within the year, she, her graduate student, Alline Storni, and I are stuck in remote cloud forest, abandoned by our helicopter pilot. We have noodles, tea, and trail bars for another two days and no idea what is the best path, if any, to take us out. Any path has to be one we cut ourselves.

The rainforests along the Atlantic coast of Brazil team with species found nowhere else on Earth. Some 8000 species of flowering plant, 200 species of birds and no one knows how many insects and fungi, are unique to these forests. Less than 6% of the forests remain.

greywingcotinga2
Três Picos is now a State Park and is a short drive from the city of Rio de Janeiro. It has spectacular scenery and contains very remote areas.

This is the front line of conservation.

Maria Alice and her colleagues must provide Brazilian State and Federal agencies with the best possible advice to prevent extinctions. She is spending a sabbatical at Duke University, working with Clinton Jenkins, one of my research group.

Using satellite images, data on elevation, and a broad knowledge of where bird species occur, they’ll produce detailed predictions of where are the richest and most vulnerable parts of the Atlantic Forest.

The computer predictions find that generally different species of birds have been collected where the computer thinks they should be and not where they shouldn’t. Maria Alice and Clinton point to the glaring exception. The grey-winged cotinga, discovered in 1980 by Michael Brooke, has been found on only two mountaintops. Along a hundred mile ridge of mountains inland of Rio de Janeiro, others areas of high elevation forest should also be home to this species.

There are no records — of this or any other species. Is the grey-winged cotinga more widespread —  and so perhaps less threatened – than we thought? What other species occur here? What is happening to these forests? This is biological terra incognito — as exciting to us as those large blanks on the maps were to geographical explorers of the 19th century.

August 2003 and I’m in Rio for a brief visit. Unexpectedly, the State government provides a helicopter for a day. Its two pilots quiz Maria Alice about her work, then become enthusiastic supporters. They give their day to fly us along the mountain chain from Serra do Tinguá in the west to Desengano in the east.

It’s brilliantly sunny, with puffy white clouds for dramatic effect. We have a great day, with unrivalled views of the forests even if Alline does look a little green. Helicopter rides are particularly unnerving when the land falls away several thousand feet in a second as the helicopter crosses a ridgeline.

Three eastern mountaintops are visible from the city of Rio itself; Tinguá is the closest and so inaccessible that our pilots cannot find a place to land. They can at Araras, the next site, and east of Três Picos — three giant, sheer-sided pillars of granite rising several thousand feet from the forest below.

We work eastwards, preparing for the exploration that will begin in December — mid-summer in the southern hemisphere. We land, check the safety of each landing place, and record it to the nearest yard on our GPS. Unbroken forest stretches for miles, but we also see the encroachment of farms that reduce the forest to tiny fragments, ones we know will be too small to support many of the original, unique and likely unknown species.

Into the mountains…

greywingcotinga2
The helicopter heads back to Rio de Janeiro. We never see it again.

Friday, December 5th, 2003. We lunch improbably in a luxurious home on the Fazenda Itatiba high in a valley a few miles from our intended camp. “It won’t be like this when we get to camp!” we joke with the fazenda’s administrator, Argélio.

The helicopter cannot carry everything we need in one trip, but will ferry the team and equipment in short trips between the fazenda and the camp. We’ve hired a private company this time. I just wish its pilot wasn’t wearing shiny black shoes, pressed black trousers and a white, starched shirt with epaulettes that vaguely suggest a naval uniform.

I fly on helicopter surveys across the world each year. Most pilots wear fatigues or tattered shorts, repudiate fashion, and have flight helmets that sport small insignia that hint of a previous life (“Da Nang”, for example) that one never brings up in conversation.

There’s a break in the clouds and I’m off.  Knowing the risks, I ensure that my tent, pack, water bottle, and the remains of last night’s pizza are with me.  

As we cross into the next valley, the clouds break. Over the landing spot, it’s bright sunshine. The pilot doesn’t land and circles around. I jab my finger energetically at the flat area of grass and smooth rocks on which we had landed in August.

As we land, I know from experience that he should keep the engine running, holding the helicopter under power in case it slips. He reduces power and I prepare to get out. He signals me to stay inside it. OK, I understand that rule: he wants to shut down completely.

Hell no, he then gets out. If wind tips the helicopter, the still rotating blades will hit the ground and the resulting shrapnel will turn me into hamburger.  I get out, grab my gear and move well away from the helicopter. I notice I’ve a companion, a worker from the fazenda. In a minute, the pilot is off.

Fifteen minutes later, he’s back in our valley, but isn’t coming this way. He lands a mile or more below us in a depression. We wave. We strip off our shirts and wave them. Through the binoculars, I watch Alline and Maria Alice unload gear and the helicopter leaves. We will never see it again.

A silence descends. I slap on the sunscreen; I had the good sense to pack. My companion calls Maria Alice on our radio. “I told at the pilot it wasn’t the right place, but he said your site was not safe,” she tells me.”

So, why didn’t he then come to fetch us?” I ask. “I screamed at him that he had to. He ignored me and left.”

“Well,” I reply, “you have too much stuff to walk up to us, we’ll have to come to you.”

“Your companion is called Gilmar” Maria Alice tells me. He wasn’t expecting to stay and has nothing but the clothes he’s wearing. And he didn’t bring any food.

Between us, we can just manage to pick everything up. It takes us three hours to reach Maria Alice and Alline. By that time, the sun has turned to rain and we’re sodden. The route is partly a bog filled with tussock grass six feet tall. A few yards takes us five minutes — and another five to get our breath back. We head for a low forest, only to find it’s a tangled thicket of bushes and bamboo.

The only practical solution is to park the gear and cut a trail with the machete, then come back for the gear, and repeat the process. We’ll have to make “the hole” our camp and explore from there. It would take three trips to get to our planned destination with all our gear — at best, a long and exhausting day.

Alline (left) and Maria Alice band birds and record data — all from the comfort of our tent. Our pjs were the only dry clothes we had.
Alline (left) and Maria Alice band birds and record data — all from the comfort of our tent. Our pjs were the only dry clothes we had.

Maria Alice has already set up our mist nets. The nets catch small birds as they fly between the trees. My job is to listen for the grey-winged cotinga, to play a tape of its song to entice it to respond, and to record songs of birds we do not recognize.

We set up tents in the rain, glad we have a third for Gilmar. The final insult is the gas stove doesn’t work. As one attaches the burner, it’s supposed to puncture the canister through a rubber seal. It doesn’t. The prospect of cold food for two days sinks in. Out comes a pocketknife, we puncture the canister, and screw on the burner quickly before all the gas escapes.

Hot noodles taste so good in the field.

Saturday, December 6th starts cold and misty, then variously fogs, drizzles, sheets, spots, torrents, and all the other forms of rain for which we Britons have so many names. We band birds and listen for songs. Gilmar cuts a trail up the hillside to our north — the direction of “home,” the fazenda. “Just in case something goes wrong,” we tell ourselves.

What I hear on the trail is not encouraging. Scientists know almost nothing about the grey-winged cotinga. It’s supposed to live just below the tree line — just where we are. It’s the other fact worries me.

The bird is supposed to occupy forest at a higher elevation than its closest relative, the black and gold cotinga. The latter’s song is one of the extraordinary sounds of the Brazilian mountains — a pure whistle several seconds long, that rises mid—point to half a note higher. The altimeter says we should be too high for it. It’s so common here that the overlapping whistles create a continuous dissonance.

I return, soaked. As evening draws in, we’re all too cold to eat outside, so we eat inside my tent. Dinner is a protracted affair, hot noodles, soup, trail bars, nuts, chocolate, dry fruit, hot chocolate to drink. We’re all in our sleeping bags to keep warm, our wet clothes piled up around us.

Tomorrow night we’ll be warm again, back at fazenda in the next valley, where the owner’s generosity has extended to a night at his house.

Sunday, December 7th. I have never learned to love the sensation of getting out of a toasty, dry sleeping bag, and pulling on cold, damp rain gear, soaked socks and boots. It’s raining; I will be wetter yet within minutes. Only hard work will generate the body heat to warm the cold clothes.

By 1pm, we’re hearing our helicopter every 15 minutes, or at least think we are. None appears.

We have no radio and cell phone connections in the “hole”. Gilmar takes a radio and cell phone and heads up his rough trail. After an hour, from his perch above the forest, he can reach us by radio and the outside world by cell phone.

The pilot is still at home.

That means at least an hour to get to the helicopter in the Rio de Janeiro traffic, longer still to reach us. “I was expecting you to call me,” he tells us.

A glorious place to get stuck!
A glorious place to get stuck!

Maria Alice is furious, for we all know how clear her instructions had been and the impossibility of us calling him from where he left us. 

 

Come in under the clouds and head up the valley from the southwest,”  I ask Maria Alice to tell Gilmar to tell the pilot. The valley floor is still clear and the clouds above it are showing patches of blue sky. “If you can’t make it today, come first thing tomorrow.”

The pilot has abandoned us in a terrible place, one from which we cannot call the outside.

There’s no reason why he shouldn’t have been here. If he doesn’t arrive in the morning, it will be a disaster. Even if we can walk out, we’ll have to abandon all our gear and will be lucky to carry out our cameras and sound recording equipment. At some later date, we’ll need to come back by helicopter to recover it. This could delay the expedition for days, even weeks.

What do I tell National Geographic?

Maria Alice worries. It could be a lot worse: we have food.

Monday, December 8th morning. We pack for the hike out and by 9am are on our way. My tent is left up, with our gear packed as neatly as we can inside it. When we reclaim all that we must now leave, we want to be able to load it quickly. The rain has eased a bit.

The way out is simple and daunting. We know where we are and where we want to be — to the nearest yard from our GPS. It’s not far — a few miles — it’s just that there is a very large mountain in the way. We must go around it. Is to the left or the right better? Gilmar has told us the bad news: the forest has bamboo thickets, but above the tree line is worse. There are open areas, but they are bare granite on slopes too steep to climb.

We also know that the fazenda’s elevation is 1500 feet below our camp. Climbing up the mountain between us will be hard, but also mean that we’ll have to climb down those 1500 feet — plus every extra foot we climb up along the way.

Stuat Pimm
Running out of tea would have been inexcusably inept. This is my last Fortnum and Mason tea bag.

Accidents are more likely going down than going up.

By lunchtime, we’re back in camp, wet, muddy from boots to hat, and smelling of rotten vegetation. After a thousand foot climb, we get radio and phone reception. We call the pilot, who incredibly thinks that we were going to call him to let him know when to come. He flew from Rio the previous afternoon, but gone to a town ten miles away and found it to be in the clouds.

That really angers us. We’ll get a bill for a thousand dollars for a trip that didn’t come close to us at a time when the weather was good in our valley.

We also reach Argélio at the fazenda by radio — and that’s the important news. He’s coming to find us and he’s not coming the short way. He’s coming up a different valley, though quite how and where is beyond me. Something about a tractor, I’m told.

Afternoon. Gilmar and I head up the opposite side of the valley from our trail. On the steep, but just accessible, granite slopes, we see a small cleft. It opens into a spectacular valley running southwards, that joins another, even larger valley coming in from the west. At its far end is the massive granite pillar of one of the Três Picos. Beyond this valley to the south, thick, white clouds cover the lowlands east of Rio de Janeiro.

Everything we can see is forest — surely one of the largest tracts of forest left in these mountains. This is a glorious, wonderful place to be stuck!

At the valley’s end — it looks miles away and thousands of feet below us — is a bright green spot. It’s a pasture and we see three men, tiny specks even through binoculars. Gilmar is talking to them on the radio. He takes off his shirt, puts it on a stick and waves it. I take off my blue rain jacked and do likewise. How on Earth they are going see us in the middle of this mountain beats me.

We wave vigorously and, improbably, they wave back.

Perched on the granite bluff, I spend the afternoon looking across it, listening. Abundant black and golds call. We’re above an exposed ridge, where the wind stunts the trees; this is supposed to be the grey-winged’s prime habitat. If it were here, I would hear it. Clouds fall into the valley, then are swept up into the sky, and from time to time brilliant sunshine turns misty grey greens into bright patches of green, with yellow and purple flowering trees adding highlights. By 5pm, our rescuers are in shouting distance in the valley below. At 730pm, just as it gets dark, six of them enter out camp.

Tuesday, December 9th. It blew hard last night, but there was little chance I would lose my tent — it had 7 men sleeping in it. Still, the wind snapped one of my tent’s poles and it’s oddly misshapen at first light.

There’s a trail bar and a cup of tea for everyone, one lump of sugar in each cup, except mine.

That exhausts all our food, but we’re happy. To run out of food before leaving, would have been inexcusably bad form. To leave our equipment behind would have been a disaster too: we just have enough helpers to carry it out.

It’s downhill all the way, sometimes steep, sometimes through dense bamboo thickets, but mostly through forest with a closed canopy that shades the forest floor and keeps it free of undergrowth.

Every step, I’m watch my feet, careful in where I place them, and use every handhold the trees and lianas afford. This is not the place to sprain an ankle.

An hour down, I see a bright orange frog on the ground.

 It’s about the size of a dime and, as I admire it, others see another, then more. There’s a colony of about a dozen of them within a few yards. Bright and conspicuous, they are advertising that it’s not a good idea to touch them. When our companions do, we warn them not to touch their eyes or lips with their fingers.

“What are they?” we ask. “Does anyone know?” While we don’t, Maria Alice’s colleague at the university is a frog specialist, and we’ll ask him. We’ve done this before elsewhere and the answer has sometimes been that no one has seen the species before.

We descend past other frog colonies, down into the valley, below where we black and gold cotingas whistle. Soon, we’re hearing bellbirds — crow—sized, white cotingas that sound like cracked bells. There are more of them than any place I’ve ever been. Their hearing so many rivals works them up into a calling frenzy.

The canopy is now far above our heads, the going more open, flatter. We come to a real trail. For the first time in days, we can stride along, rather than tentatively place each foot down. I feel warm. My clothes are drying. Three hours after we started, we’re in the open pasture we saw yesterday, looking back to where we’ve come, marveling that anyone could see us from this distance.

A tiny orange frog that was indeed unknown to science at the time I took this photo.
A tiny orange frog that was indeed unknown to science at the time I took this photo.

We hike along another trail, find another clearing, hike more, and then in the next clearing there’s a tractor. How many people can you fit on a tractor? Ten — and their equipment — is the impossible answer.

On the back of a tractor, down a narrow trail a 4×4 would not navigate, past, then around the granite domes of Três Picos, not fast, not elegant, but down and down, warmer and drier with each slow, bumpy mile until we make it out. We walk stiffly the last few yards to the hot showers.

On the beach at Ipanema.

By 7pm, we’re on the beach at Ipanema, having a beer with Michael Brooke and discussing our plans. We should be in Arraras by now, but Maria Alice will need a day to regroup, check the equipment, buy food, and most important of all, find another helicopter pilot.

I will now miss Araras, for I must leave on Friday night. My body demands I spend tomorrow soaking in a hot bath and drying my gear. Michael arrived two days ago and hasn’t come this far to watch the beach. We set our alarms for 5am.

greywingcotinga8
Grey-winged cotinga

Wednesday, December 10th. By 830am, Michael and I are slogging up a trail in Serra dos Órgãos National Park heading for where he found the grey-winged cotinga 20 years ago. It’s my only hope to see the bird now and, importantly, to see how the forest here differs from that near Três Picos. Every muscle hurts as we climb hour after hour, stopping only for me to catch my breath.

We climb up through where the black and gold cotingas are whistling, then leave them below us. We listen, straining to hear the grey-winged’s call. No such luck.

Thursday, December 11th. There’s so much excitement in Maria Alice’s apartment as we pack the food, organize and check the equipment. In an instant, they’re off, and I’m alone. I wash my gear, write my notes, check my e-mail, enjoy a beer on the beach, listen to the BBC World Service after dinner.

I wasn’t expecting a phone call. From high on the ridge at Araras, exactly where they should be, exactly where I should be, Maria Alice has excellent reception. “Wish you were!” Next morning, the phone rings again.

We have grey-winged cotingas calling all around us” she tells me. You really should be there!”

“Yes,” I think, “I really should be.”

Postscript

Maria Alice completed the work for her National Geographic Grant.  It would have been impossible if she had lost all the equipment. In time, she published her work as two scientific papers:

Alves, M. A. S., S. L. Pimm, A. Storni, M. A. Raposo, M. de L. Brooke, G. Harris, A. Foster, and C. N. Jenkins. 2008. Mapping and exploring the distribution of a threatened bird, Grey-winged Cotinga. Oryx. 42, 562-566

Alves, M.A. S., C.N. Jenkins, S.L. Pimm, A. Storni, M.A. Raposo, M. de L. Brooke, G. Harris and A. Foster. 2009. Birds, Montane forest, State of Rio de Janeiro, Southeastern Brazil. Check List 5: 289-200.

On the flight in August, we had seen one possible site where we could drive up a road to see the bird.  Andy Foster explored that area and found it there.

Two years after I wrote this story, I went to that site, found the bird and filmed and photographed it for the first time.

Categories: Birds, Brazil, Saving Nature Collection

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