Shade-grown Coffee

I'm sure most environmentally conscious readers have heard of shade-grown coffee; know it's better for birds and the environment. But I'd bet that not many of y'all have walked in a plantation. I'd like to take you along on my morning in a Honduran shade coffee plantation at Finca Las Glorias, near Lake Yojoa in Honduras. What fun it is to be able to do this!

Coffee, a shiny-leaved tropical shrub, was originally a shade-tolerant plant. Artificial selection produced a sun-tolerant plant with higher yield, and the traditional method of growing coffee under an understory of native shade trees was largely abandoned in favor of widescale deforestation for sun coffee plantations. Oh, and heavy pesticide use, since the sun-grown coffee was thought to require that. This was devastating to migratory and resident tropical birds, which had been happily foraging and living in shade coffee plantations all along. Migrants returning to their shady haunts were greeted with green ecological deserts of sun-grown coffee and nothing else.

Does this look like a desert to you? Does it even look like a farm? Well, it doesn't to the birds, either. This is a shade coffee plantation and as a birdwatcher, I can attest it's a wonderful place to be.

 Look up, and there are towering forest trees making a broken canopy

Look down, and there's a heavy understory of fruiting coffee.

 You can just make out the rows of coffee shrubs in this shot. Look at the size of those trees! They were growing here originally when the understory was cleared and planted to shade coffee.

 This is one of the most enticing birding roads I've ever walked.

 I kept looking up and spinning slowly around, seeing resident tropical birds in the canopy overhead

 and sweet North American migrants like this black-throated green warbler in the coffee underneath.

 They seemed to be asking me to tell everyone that shade-grown coffee isn't just a "green" catch phrase. It's the real deal. The plantations are useful--vital, even, to many North American migrants--orioles, tanager, warblers, gnatcatchers, vireos. I'm not sure why "our" birds use shade coffee plantations so heavily. Sometimes I wonder if they have been forced into them by deforestation elsewhere, and being migrants, have to be more flexible in their habitat requirements than Neotropical resident birds.

Which are also well-represented in the plantations. This fine brown jay screamed lustily, a percussive pow! in each call. It sounded like somebody was hitting him with a hammer, forcing the YEAH! out of him.

A fine-looking giant cowbird, nest parasite of oropendolas.  Get this: Neal G. Smith's 1968 study of giant cowbird parasitism on oropendolas showed that oropendola babies with baby giant cowbirds in the nest with them had better survivorship than those in unparasitized nests. Exactly the opposite of what you'd expect, with the cowbirds hogging the food and all... This was because the giant cowbird chicks are, for altricial birds, born quite a bit more with it than are oropendola chicks, and they are able to repel adult botflies and preen botfly larvae off themselves and the baby oropendolas, too. Botflies are true parasites, burrowing into the flesh of oropendola nestlings and weakening or killing them altogether.  The snapping and preening behavior exhibited by giant cowbird chicks toward invading botflies and their larvae is unique among altricial passerine birds.  But, like many stories of tropical biology, it gets weirder. 

Oropendolas that nest near colonies of social wasps and stingless bees get protection from botflies by some unknown mechanism. They don't need cowbirds in their nests. Oropendolas in those colonies  are discriminators, and will toss out any egg that isn't identical to their own. So the cowbirds that attempt to parasitize those oropendolas nesting near wasps and bees have evolved eggs that closely mimic the oropendola eggs, and the female cowbirds that lay those mimetic eggs sneak around and lay them when the oropendolas aren't around.

Female giant cowbirds parasitizing oropendolas that aren't protected by wasps and bees lay nonmimetic eggs, and they barge right in and lay those obviously different eggs in the oropendola nest after chasing off the rightful owner of the nest! These unprotected oropendolas don't discriminate, or throw out the eggs, even though they look different.  And the cowbirds "thank" their hosts by leaving eggs that will hatch into babies that will preen the botfly larvae off the host's young. 

Such is tropical biology, where parasitism can evolve into commensalism in this hothouse of amazing adaptation, where every bug's got a bug on him, which has a bug on him...

Having delightful trouble staying on topic. I never know what's going to come out of me in these posts. More shade coffee anon.

Want to find certified bird-friendly coffee for sale near you? Follow this link to the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center's map of US retailers.

More Peccary Love

While the collared peccary is to be reckoned with when protecting its young, the larger white-lipped peccary is dangerous at any time, and I’ve heard stories of people treed for hours by a herd of white-lips. Perhaps it’s knowing that they’re dangerous that makes me appreciate petting these tame javelinas. "Javelina" refers to the spear-tip canines you'll see in a moment.

I love this photo, their crooked little incisors and pink medallion noses.

For their part, they seem to think my Snickers bar pieces are bits of heaven. Those who haven’t had one stick their nose discs right in the mouths of those who have, inhaling the chocolate scent, then turning to me with inquisitive nostrils.

When the treats are gone,  they wander off and lie down, and one yawns widely before he puts his head 

between his front feet, doglike. He's getting sleepy.

Every time I look at this photo I yawn.

I peek inside his pink mouth and see two-inch-long tushes, ivory white, razor sharp, lying at a 45-degree angle to his lower jaw, and wonder at my own temerity, massaging their ears and muzzles, cheerfully inviting a severed wrist. Holy tropical pork. I'm glad I've already done my javelinafondling for the day.

Looking at him dozing there, missing Chet Baker something awful, I know I'd do it again. Oh, how I want to cut a hole in their enclosure. 

In another life I'd be a socially irresponsible ecoterrorist.

See those bony projections just below the wire? Yowza. Fools go where angels dare to tread. 

This is how I go through life, trusting animals I shouldn’t, crooning to them, petting them, sniffing my fingers to catch their scent. Just for those moments, I’m making some kind of connection, reaching a caring hand across the species gap. I have been bitten before and will be bitten again, but for this golden green afternoon, I’m spared, left to love again.

Candid ambush photo of Zick getting all handfunky by Colene McKee, with thanks to her and Bill for this, the groovy little travel mugs, the yummy rum and conversation. We had some fun, didn't we?

Petting the Peccary

At Lake Yojoa's Hotel Las Glorias, I wander over to the little zoo that so many Latin American hotels seem to consider standard equipment, along with crowing roosters and barking dogs. (Those are vital to a good night's sleep, apparently).

Two white-tailed deer—endangered in Honduras—step delicately around their concrete-floored pen, dodging puddles of their own urine. The buck has knobbled antlers, still in velvet, and a heartbreakingly soft pink tongue, with which he cleans my fingers. I pull big handfuls of fresh grass for him and his slender mate, and leave them eating. I want to open their pen, but I know they’d be killed within hours by people hungry for protein. They make me deeply sad, these  creatures who were never meant to be confined, who for the rest of their lives will walk delicate circles on wet cement.

 

Next, I call to the captive javelinas, the little wild pigs that root and trot through the forests. Technically, they're collared peccaries Pecari tajacu, and they aren't actually in the Suidae but in their own family, the  Tayassuidae. They've got fabulous long oily hair, which acts as a water-repellent raincoat in their wet lush habitat.

 Distributed throughout Central and tropical South America, including the island of Trinidad, they are omnivores who live in family groups of six to several dozen. It's clear they're highly social. They interact freely, travel in a group, and seem to really dig talking with me.

 Their enclosure is large and grassy, though it’s littered with coils of barbed wire and garbage. They come over in single file and sniff my hands with their mobile pink discs, grunting softly. 

Feeling bold, I scratch the tops of their heads, and find one juvenile female who luxuriates under my touch. I rub all along her ears and jaw bars as her eyes close in delight. When I’m done, my fingers smell terrible—BO and onions. Here's the scent gland of a peccary--a mucky bare spot on the top of the rump.

  It's actually gooey with what must be an exudate to be rubbed on tree trunks and anything else the piggie wants to mark. They're otherwise such lovely little animals...I muse that the adaptive significance of a gooey scent gland might be to save the peccary from the pet trade.

 

 The pigs naturally exude a strong fetid odor, one I know because I have smelled it in the wild. You can usually smell white-lipped peccaries before you see them, and the odor, happened upon in a humid forest, always sends a chill through me. I look about for the nearest low-branched tree, which anyone who's ever been in humid tropical forest knows, is usually nonexistent. I eye the telephone poles all around me and wonder if I could shin up one if I were terrified enough. 

More peccary love anon...