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Hoatzins

Tourists’ noise pollution doesn’t only harm endangered sea turtles—it also harms hoatzins. It’s to be expected, right? …Except this noise pollution comes from ecotourists.

Bird watching can have its perils, it seems, since even quiet conversation among bird watchers can cause extreme stress to some species of wild birds. Daniel Karp of Stanford University has researched three species of hoatzins (Opisthocomus hoazin) in areas surrounding various eco lodges within the Peruvian Amazon.

Even library conversation-volume chats induced defense mechanisms in the birds, causing them to cluck and defecate. Wow. The birds were found to climb and fly away as well. The hoatzins’ behavior was contingent on how loudly people spoke.

What’s most troublesome is the fact that stress disturbs these birds’ rearing capabilities, thwarting the chicks’ training to become self-sufficient and leading to “heightened mortality rates.”

To gather information, Karp approached hoatzin habitats by canoe and experimented between being silent and playing recordings of conversations at different volumes from different distances, keeping track of when birds became stressed enough to fly away. Karp first tried playing the conversations at 50 decibels (library conversation volume), then at 60 (actual volume of typical tourists’ chats in bird watching zones), and at 70 (the loudest conversations he was able to record). The study was conducted last year and lasted one month.

While Karp says “ceas[ing] all conversation” and staying far enough away should be sufficient to prevent freaking out hoatzins, behavioral ecologist and conservation biologist at UCLA Dam Blumstein says that, although we think being ecotourists is awesome, we’re being careless and irresponsible anyway.

Moral of the study: ecotourism is not as green as we may have thought.

No kidding. (Yes, I am bitter.)

Apparently, even when quietly hiking through undergrowth, [eco]tourists cause wildlife extreme stress. Bird watching, wildlife watching, and hiking are all harmful to carnivores’ survival and/or reproduction rates. The victims are dolphins, dingoes, penguins, and polar bears, among many other species.

Well, crap.

Not only should we keep from being destructive when in natural areas, but we should also not even go there.

Well, at least now I have evidence to back up my theory that ecotourism and eco hotels within fragile natural areas do more harm than good.

Parrots in the Amazon (photo by Orthopod1)

I am not a big fan of the World Bank, but maybe this time they’ve done something laudable: the bank has approved a $1.3 billion loan for the Brazilian government to spend on improving environmental management programs.

Given the environmental charge of the Amazon in the world (one-third of the planet’s tropical rainforests), this is good news! Maybe this effort will have a domino effect leading to less deforestation of the Brazilian rainforest. I’m hoping and hard, you better believe it.

The program focuses on forests, water conservation and energy efficiency. All aspects of the program will be involved in the climate change cause, e.g. deforestation leads to biodiversity loss and climate change, therefore, the program’s interests will include diminishing deforestation in Brazil.

Nice. After all, a better environmental management program really isn’t if ravaging deforestation isn’t dealt with! Honestly, I can’t help but be suspicious, even cynical at times. But Brazil does have a lot hanging on the Amazon, since it contains 60% of it, so their motivation lies there. Probably.

“This requires a commitment from all levels of government, whether federal, state or municipal, paying special attention to social programs, many of which include programs for sustainable growth,” said Guido Mantegna, Brazil’s Minister of Finance.

No sh*t. I mean, would we be that surprised if this money ended up being used on pseudo-green projects that would ultimately harm the environment? Anything’s possible with money, and if it were environmentalists who had it, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Plus, they had $488.6 million to spend on the environment and chose to fork it over to the military for “protection.”

To round it out a bit, here’s a related article you might be interested in: whether Obama should give Brazil $16 billion yearly to conserve the Amazon rainforests.

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