Deep in the Cordillera de Colán, an isolated mountain range in northern Peru just east of the Andes in the western Amazon Basin, Nico Dauphine, a graduate student from the Cooper Lab at the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, is collaborating with members of a native Amazonian people, the Aguaruna, to promote bird conservation throughout the mountain ecosystem.

“I wanted to work together with the local Aguaruna people to compile the first ever inventory of birds in the area,” Dauphine explains. “Aguaruna residents exhibit extensive knowledge of bird taxonomy, ecology and behavior, and have a sophisticated understanding of biodiversity. They will play an important role in raising awareness of the conservation value of birds in this extraordinarily species-rich area.”

Including local people in regional conservation means Dauphine and her colleagues will conduct environmental education workshops and field biology methods training in order to enable them to participate effectively in managing a newly designated protected area in the region, the Cordillera de Colán Reserve.

This extraordinary project combining ecological conservation and cross-cultural cooperation was made possible thanks to an OVPPSO IDEAS Grant awarded to Wildlife Ecology Professor Robert Cooper.

Between October 2004 and March 2005, Dauphine worked with a team of Aguaruna researchers to survey birds and their habitats in the northwestern Cordillera de Colán, adjacent to the northern part of Cordillera de Colán Reserve.

“In contrast to the high rate of deforestation reported elsewhere in the Cordillera de Colán by researchers in 1994 and 1995, we observed a relatively low rate of deforestation consistent with the traditional extractive activities of the Aguaruna,” Dauphine reports. “Extractive activities in the area include subsistence hunting and fishing, shifting agriculture and single-tree selective logging.”

While compiling the first inventory of birds in the area, the team recorded a highly diverse avifauna comprising 395 species and 45 families, which includes a number of threatened and endemic species and highlights the significance of the area for biodiversity conservation.

“We located new populations of an endangered hummingbird, the Royal Sunangel (Heliangelus regalis) and the globally threatened Orange-throated Tanager (Wetmorethraupis sterropteron), in addition to a number of other sightings of threatened and endemic birds,” reports Dauphine.

“We have also been studying the effects of selective logging on understory bird communities in the area,” she continues. “To this end, we conducted constant-effort mist netting in forest with different logging histories compared with unlogged forest. We captured and released 723 birds of 102 species, and are currently analyzing the results to determine whether recent logging may lead to changes in bird diversity and abundance.”

The preliminary results of this project were presented at the 2005 meetings of the American Ornithologists’ Union and the Society for Economic Botany. In addition, detailed research reports have been delivered to conservation NGOs active in the region, including Conservation International, the American Bird Conservancy, and the Peruvian Association for Nature Conservation.