Great Conservation News from Ecuador!

Ecuador's Jocotoco Foundation and the US-based Rainforest Trust have purchased a final, key property to "create a permanent refuge for the largest population of Andean Condors in the Northern Andes." Woolly Tapirs and Spectacled Bears also roam those hills.

 Andean Condor in Cayambe-Coca National Park

(Photos by Narca)

The newly-acquired Hacienda Antisanilla lies at the foot of the towering Volcán Antisana, and was one of the former private inholdings within the Antisana Ecological Reserve. These inholdings were being converted from forest to pasture and farmland; fires which started there burned into the reserve; illegal poaching based from the inholdings was rampant and difficult to control; and the most important watershed for the city of Quito was being undermined. Now effective preservation of both the reserve and Quito's watershed can be achieved.

Antisana Ecological Reserve is important not only in its own right, but also as a corridor between two national parks –– Gran Sumaco and Cayambe-Coca (more on Cayambe-Coca in a future post!).

Sign for Cayambe-Coca National Park at Papallacta Pass

Acquisition of this final property completes the effort to bring effective protection to 1.8 million acres of Andean and Amazonian ecosystems.

How needed was this reserve? All it takes is a two-day drive down the Andes from Quito south to the Peruvian border, to see just how much forest in Ecuador has already been lost. Along many stretches, for mile after mile, the country is denuded, and the tiny forest remnants are pitiful indeed. The few scattered reserves in the region are critically important.

If you'd like to read more about this project and other inspiring Rainforest Trust efforts in Bolivia, Peru, Brazil and Colombia, check out their latest newsletter.

TrekWest and the Western Wildway

John Davis is undertaking an epic journey––by foot, horseback, bicycle, boat––to dramatize the need for wildways, for safe wildlife corridors that connect habitats and wildlands to each other. This particular Western Wildway is a 6000-mile-long corridor stretching from the Northern Jaguar Preserve in Sonora, Mexico, into Canada. The wildway's route is based on more than a decade of scientific research and conservation mapping.

John Davis (Photo from his blog)

Not only will completion of the wildlife corridor allow large animals, requiring large home ranges, to roam where they need to go (and thus survive!), but the corridor may also buffer against the effects of global warming by conserving a north-south span of continuous natural landscapes, where changes in the plant and animal communities can proceed, by contracting or expanding with the changing climate.

The work of restoring connections between habitats is being undertaken by a coalition of highly respected conservation organizations, under the auspices of the Wildlands Network and including, in our own Arizona, the Sky Island Alliance and Grand Canyon Wildlands Council. Partners in Mexico include the Northern Jaguar Project, Naturalia, and Cuenca los Ojos (known to birders as the legendary Cajón Bonito).

I urge you to check out the TrekWest website, and to follow the excitement of the journey through John's blog of the epic trip. A film by Ed George is documenting and celebrating the journey, and will one day be launched for all to see.

Grand Canyon Wildland Council is also featuring TrekWest and other conservation news in their blog.

The vision of connecting wildways through North America (and elsewhere, like Australia) is perhaps the most exciting conservation initiative to emerge in recent decades.