5 Projects Transforming the Prospects for Birds and People in Latin America

Jorge Velásquez will never forget the day he presented his undergraduate thesis at a national ornithology conference in Colombia. The young biologist had identified gaps in parrot conservation and pinpointed specific places where new protected areas could have the greatest impact. “Someone from the Colombian Ministry of the Environment said to me, ‘This research is great. But you do know this is never going to happen, right?’ ” Velásquez recalls. It took 20 years, but now that same kind of science is guiding one of the most ambitious conservation partnerships in the hemisphere.

The initiative, called Conserva Aves, is a transformational effort, says Aurelio Ramos, Audubon’s managing director for Latin America and the Caribbean. Major bird conservation groups—Audubon, BirdLife International, the American Bird Conservancy, and Birds Canada—have teamed up with the Latin American and Caribbean Network of Environmental Funds, the region’s largest environmental financing consortium. They’re addressing substantial conservation gaps by supporting local organizations and Indigenous groups in creating protected sites that benefit migratory and resident birds.

Governments usually focus on creating large national parks that can take years to set up, leaving behind the urgent needs of birds in decline, says Velásquez, Audubon’s science director for Latin America and the Caribbean: “We don’t have that kind of time.”

Conserva Aves takes a more fluid approach. It channels grants, typically about $125,000, to local communities and organizations for projects that protect birds and create sustainable livelihoods. It unites the fundraising capacity and on-the-ground experience of BirdLife partners with Audubon’s science to identify conservation “hot­spots,” places that host rich wildlife and are used by people, says Ian Davidson, BirdLife International’s regional director for the Americas.

Since 2021, Conserva Aves has helped create, expand, or support more than 180 protected areas managed by 200 partners in nine countries. More than 1,840 bird species benefit from habitat protection through Conserva Aves, including 82 species that are critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable. And 51,000 people benefit from training programs, sustainable livelihoods, and strengthened local governance. Seeing the work unfold “has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my professional life,” Velásquez says. The initiative stretches well beyond his desk. Conserva Aves is building a conservation legacy designed to reverberate for decades. From Mexico to Chile, it’s already boosting the prospects for hundreds of bird species while uplifting the people who live alongside them. 

Linking Protections: Colombia

For the past two decades, Afro-descendant communities in northwestern Colombia have managed their collective lands by putting conservation at the forefront. In 2025 Conserva Aves helped them undertake one last critical step toward protecting their ecologically rich landscape and supporting their local economy.

The effort dates back to the formation in 2002 of the Community Council of Black Communities of the Tolo River Basin and Southern Coastal Zone (COCOMASUR), which manages nearly 100,000 acres of jointly owned land. “We’ve always, even our eldest, been about conservation,” says Ferney Caicedo Panesso, COCOMASUR’s technical coordinator of biodiversity monitoring. After a failed foray into logging a small tract, they went all in on maintaining their considerable natural resources.

By 2010 they had established the world’s first community-owned territory to issue carbon market certificates. Companies offset their emissions by paying COCOMASUR to conserve the corridor, and the community used the funds for new conservation efforts, Caicedo Panesso says. Next they formed a protected stretch of forests, mountains, and marshes critical for birds. And in 2013, they partnered with the national park service and neighboring communities to create a nesting sanctuary for vulnerable sea turtles.

Despite those efforts, a swath of unprotected habitat remained among these three areas. Conserva Aves helped them bridge the gap, says Marcela Ibarra Becerra, a forest monitor and COCOMASUR’s Conserva Aves project coordinator. The initiative covered the legal expenses involved in safeguarding 10,500 acres that connect the existing protected areas, ensuring that wildlife can continue to roam across ecosystems. Eight forest guardians regularly walk or ride horses through the area, employing GPS units, optics, and cameras to note habitat changes and record the species they encounter. The funds also helped expand monitoring efforts to track key bird species.

Some tourists had always visited, but with the Conserva Aves grant, locals created new economic opportunities. They mapped birding routes, trained guides, and bought birding tools such as binoculars and field guides. “Communities that didn’t see themselves as being able to provide community-based tourism services are now seeing that they can,” Ibarra Becerra says. “The project presents development alternatives without changing who we are.”

Growing Commitment: Mexico

The Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the narrowest land connection between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in Mexico, is an exceptional place. Its varied landscapes range from swampy, tropical jungles on the northern Gulf coast to temperate mountains, which give way to dry, tropical savanna on the Pacific slopes. A wide array of endemic species, including 11 kinds of birds, occupy the rich mix of habitats, says Jorge Montejo, a biologist with SOS Social Solutions, a nonprofit that promotes environmental education and behavioral change at the local level. 

Scientists have conducted only a few studies of this ecological treasure trove, Montejo says, and many locals are largely unaware of the biodiversity in their backyard. Zuleyma Enríquez Casique has always loosely noted the abundance of birds around her on the southern portion of the isthmus on the collectively owned and cooperatively farmed lands known as the Mazahua Ejido. “I sometimes looked at them, admiring their colors, but that’s about it,” she says. A Conserva Aves–funded project, led by SOS Social Solutions, aims to change that. 

The group is working with local residents to establish conservation areas on nearly 25,000 acres in the Mazahua, Almoloya-Rincón Vaquero, and Mena Nizanda ejidos. The areas span the wide variety of habitats and are home to a diverse range of communities, including Afro-Mexican farmers and Indigenous Zapoteco and Zoque peoples. Each community guided the selection of protected areas according to their cultural and biological values. The proposed boundaries of one, for instance, encompass places where community healers gather most of their plants, says Marissa Anzueto, general director of SOS Social Solutions. 

In others, the presence of birds will help draw the lines. Enríquez Casique and Mario Torres Ordaz, who is also from Mazahua Ejido, are two of the nine people training to survey and monitor local birds and their habitats. To begin, they are focusing on five vulnerable species—Yellow-headed Amazons, Green Parakeets, Cinnamon-tailed Sparrows, and Rose-bellied and Orange-breasted Buntings—in three proposed protected areas. Last year, Enríquez Casique and Torres Ordaz used binoculars for the first time. With a new GPS unit, the budding birdwatchers mapped the routes they will traverse at least once a week through the end of 2026 to look for target species. 

“The first time I heard about birdwatching, I thought, ‘They’re crazy,’ ” Torres Ordaz says. “We didn’t know it was such a big thing, globally. Now that we do and we know what we have, we are ready to conserve the birds and take care of them.”

Accelerating Autonomy: Bolivia 

Alfredo Matareco Maza learned how to fight fire alongside his father in San José del Cavitu, their village in the Bolivian Amazon rainforest. Every dry season, they followed the community’s long-­standing rules for lighting controlled burns intended to prevent destructive wildfires, such as always waiting until after rainfall to burn small plots of cropland and using fire lines to contain the flames. These traditional methods proved effective until 2023, when an extreme drought led to unprecedented wildfires in the Southwest Amazonian rainforest. It was a wake-up call, Matareco Maza says: They needed new allies and strategies.

Luckily, Matareco Maza was in a good position to do something about that. In 2023 he had become the first chief, or Cacique, of a new Multi-ethnic Indigenous Territory (TIM) that includes 28 communities. Under this unique form of government, Indigenous communities have unprecedented autonomy and access to funding to protect their lands from outside threats such as illegal logging, hunting, mining, and land occupation, says Catalina Rivadeneira Canedo, coordinator for the Amazon Region at Oré, a nonprofit dedicated to Indigenous self-determination and conservation.

From the start, Matareco Maza says, one of the TIM’s priorities was to safeguard Loma Santa, a biodiverse region with wetlands, floodplains, and forests. The area is home to several Indigenous groups, including the T’simane people, whose way of life is closely tied to the forest, and it borders one of Bolivia’s largest national protected areas, TIPNIS. It is also increasingly at risk from wildfire. In 2024, under a federal law promoted by the TIM government, Loma Santa became the first Indigenous protected area in the Bolivian Amazon. The next step for communities was determining how to manage those 500,000 acres within the TIM.

Through Oré, Conserva Aves provided funding and support to make the goal a reality in short order. 

The Oré team worked with Indigenous leaders, local authorities, and T’siname people to create biodiversity inventories of bird and fish species and develop a management plan. Last August the TIM publicly presented strategies for maintaining the conservation area, which supports nearly 280 bird species and allows fishing and hunting for personal use. “Although we already had the idea, Conserva Aves gave us the push we needed,” Matareco Maza says. 

To ensure that the conservation area is well managed, 60 Indigenous people with deep local knowledge of the landscape trained as forest rangers, says Oré biologist Miguel Ángel Fernández. The rangers monitor the health of rivers, forests, and wildlife throughout the TIM. 

To help safeguard the newly established conservation area against wildfire, 16 of the rangers have received firefighting equipment and training through Conserva Aves. They combine traditional methods, new tools, and modern technologies like weather stations, which has helped them more effectively prevent large wildfires, Matareco Maza says. Given the uncertainties climate change presents, having these resources is more important than ever. “We can now prioritize so many needs according to our reality,” Matareco Maza says.

Making Inroads: Peru 

Residents of Calabaza, a tiny Indigenous Quechua Huanca village in Peru’s Satipo cloud forest, haven’t historically seen a lot of tourists. In recent decades, hardcore birders occasionally showed up looking for elusive species like the Oxapampa Antpitta and the Junin Tapaculo, but these visitors were always guided by outside agencies that barely engaged with the community, says Gerson Ferrer, communications director for Yunkawasi, a Peruvian conservation organization and Conserva Aves partner.

The community was interested in drawing more avitourists who would contribute to the local economy. When the local soccer team won the 2012 regional soccer championship, they used their winnings to build lodging for birders. But they didn’t know how to move forward with recruiting the visitors.

In early 2024, Yunkawasi and government representatives arrived to provide a potential solution: creating a protected area that would draw ecotourism. Initially, they were met with distrust. A road has crossed this region since colonial times, yet decades of armed conflict isolated Indigenous villages throughout the 1980s and 1990s. What’s more, the few conservation initiatives undertaken by outsiders had conflicted with ranching and agriculture in some places, which threatened residents’ livelihoods. “We weren’t interested in coordinating with external conservation initiatives,” says Amador Macario Alanya, president of the community-based tourism association Calabaza Corazón.

At first, residents shunned the meetings Yunkawasi held. It was only after the biologists celebrated with them at the town’s anniversary party that locals engaged. Slowly, says Yunkawasi director Fanny Cornejo, they gained the trust of people in Calabaza and nine other Indigenous communities in and around the proposed 130,000-acre protected area. 

Yunkawasi and the regional government worked with communities to determine permitted activities within the protected area, which is in the final stages of official recognition. The conservationists are supporting Ashaninka farmers who are converting open coffee plots into shade-grown ones that harbor a bevy of birds. They’re collaborating with Quechua Huanca farmers to maintain local potato varieties using a combination of ancient and modern techniques. They’ve also teamed up with a dairy cooperative to improve products and diversify with a new line of yogurt and ice cream made with local fruits.

In Calabaza, residents are realizing the long-held avitourism dream. Community leaders and biologists mapped birding routes and strengthened local capacity for receiving visitors. Last year, for the first time ever, Calabaza took part in the Global Big Day, when people worldwide tally all the birds they see. On May 10, 2025, 35 visitors walked the three new trails, spotting 80-plus species, including the Peruvian Wren and Yellow-scarfed Tanager. “It was really exciting because we’d never seen anything like it,” Alanya says. The event was a small victory: an important step toward building a future that they now dare to dream they’ll achieve. 

Sounding Survival: Colombia

This story originally ran in the Spring 2026 issue as “Common Interest.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.