Your Visit is Helping a Rare Bird in Colombia
Press pause on life for a moment and journey with us to the wilds of Colombia. Upon arrival you meet with your travel partner and guide and embark on an 8 mile hike into the mountains where you will spend the night at a farmers house. You wake with the sun the next morning, listening to the call of howler monkeys as you climb out of your hammock and prepare yourself for a day of hiking. For the next two weeks, your days are full of trekking through the mountains, talking to locals, and setting up camera traps. What are you in search of? A rare and elusive bird – the blue-billed curassow.
This is the exact journey our assistant bird curator Chris Holmes has recently returned from. Chris has been directly involved in blue-billed conservation both in the US and Colombia since joining the Houston Zoo full-time in 2000. Unique to Colombia, there are only a few hundred blue-billed curassows left in the wild due to habitat destruction and hunting. Currently, the only known location of this bird is within a reserve in the southern portion of its range and little research has been done in the northern half, leaving a huge gap in the knowledge base about this species. Chris, who serves as the American Zoos and Aquariums regional program population manager for the species and Christian Olaciregui, the Colombian population manager for blue-billed curassows and head of biology and conservation at Barranquilla Zoo, hope to close this gap by exploring this area of Colombia that has been historically inaccessible. As fate would have it, Proyecto Tití, a Houston Zoo partner working with cotton-top tamarin monkeys just happens to be situated in the Montes de Maria region of Colombia – an area where the blue-billed curassow is believed to live but has been rarely seen. Knowing if these birds are in the area will help to strengthen conservation efforts for this critically-endangered bird species, and will inform next steps as plans for the future are discussed.
Chris’s time in Colombia was not just focused on seeking out blue-billed curassow tracks and setting up camera traps in an attempt to locate the birds – he and Christian also spent a great deal of time talking with local organizations and land owners as they are playing a huge role in leading conservation efforts in the study area. As Chris explains it: “On day two, we walked out of the forest along the riverbed to go back to the City of San Juan as there was a meeting of the Regional Protected Areas System which included, The Colombian Environmental Authority, Proyecto Titi, other regional NGOs, and local farmers to discuss the projects they are working on together.This meeting illustrated the massive amount of work and dedication that is going on in this region. There is a lot of work being put into connecting the National Park through-out this area via a system of corridors, to ensure that there are not any patches of forest that are isolated by cattle farming or agricultural activities. All of these groups have seen successes in having private land owners set aside plots of their private property to remain, or be developed into corridors to connect habitat.”
The fact that these efforts are already underway in the region is excellent, and will be particularly important should the camera traps provide evidence of blue-billed curassows in the area. Christian and the team in Colombia will continue to check the traps periodically to see what images are recovered, and we can’t wait to see what they find! While we await the results, make sure to drop by and check out the wattled curassow, an endangered relative of the blue-billed curassow, on your next trip to the zoo and come face-to-face with one of the many species you are helping to save in the wild!
