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Why thousands of people are traveling to one country to see these birds

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Friday, January 3, 2025

A crimson-rumped toucanet at a popular birdwatching destination in southwestern Colombia called La Florida. This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. Haga clic aquí para leer esta historia en español. VALLE DEL CAUCA, Colombia — From the side of an old highway that cuts through the Andean foothills, Dora Alicia Londoño’s home looks unremarkable. Located in a rural area about two hours from Cali, the largest city in southern Colombia, it’s a simple, two-story concrete building with a sheet metal roof. A few potted plants hang from the rafters.  The main attraction is in her backyard.  There, you will find birds. So many birds. And these are not just your common backyard varieties, like robins and bluejays, but rare forest species that birdwatchers around the world yearn to see. Londoño, 63, has turned her home into a birdwatching lodge, a paradise. There are five guest rooms and a cafe with a view into her backyard, a dense tropical forest. There, she has a homemade bird feeder: wooden shelves holding pieces of fruit. Upstairs, on the roof, she had additional feeders for hummingbirds. When I visited on a warm morning in October, it felt like stepping into a nature documentary. The backyard was teeming with birds, none of which I’d seen before: glistening green mountain tanagers, toucan barbets, lemon-browed flycatchers, velvet-purple coronets. These birds were so colorful they almost looked unreal, painting the yard with streaks of yellows, reds, blues, and purples. And then there was the noise — a clamor of cheeps, trills, and squawks.   “The toucan barbet is one of the rarest birds in the world and it just eats bananas right here,” said Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela, a Colombian-born conservation ecologist and bird expert at the University of California Santa Cruz, who was at Londoño’s with me that morning. In an hour or so, I saw about 45 different species, Ocampo-Peñuela estimates, while leisurely sipping coffee and eating empanadas. If this is birdwatching, I’m in. If you’re into birds, Colombia is the place to be. It has more avian species than any other country on Earth, with close to 2,000 distinct and often very beautiful varieties, nearly 20 percent of the world’s birds. That diversity is rooted in geography. Colombia is a mosaic of different habitats, from tropical rainforest to snow-capped mountains, and different birds have adapted to each of them. And as I experienced that morning, birding here can be incredibly easy. You don’t even need hiking shoes. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r<e.length;r++)if(e[r].contentWindow===a.source){var i=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";e[r].style.height=i}}}))}(); This isn’t much of a secret. In the last decade, the activity of birdwatching has exploded in Colombia, said Ocampo-Peñuela, who also studies ecotourism. Activity on eBird, a platform where birders can record their observations, increased more than 27-fold in Colombia since 2010, according to unpublished research by Ocampo-Peñuela and other authors that’s currently under review. While the bulk of these birders are foreigners from places like the US and Canada, more and more Colombians are picking up the hobby, too, she said.  This burgeoning industry is, as many experts argue, a rare force of good. It’s funneling money into rural communities and creating material value for healthy forests — something the environmental movement has, for decades, struggled to do. Indeed, at a time when tropical forests and grasslands are besieged by farming, mining, and other threats, birdwatching tourism offers a real incentive to keep ecosystems intact. Without forests, there are no birds, no birders, and no birding tourism.  There are, no doubt, concerns about sustainability as this young industry matures and more foreign tourists descend on Colombia. But for now, local communities are at the helm of this industry, which is good for people, good for the local economy, and good for wildlife. They intend to keep it that way. Londoño, who goes by Doña Dora, didn’t dream of running a birdwatching lodge and welcoming tourists into her backyard. In the 1990s, she moved here, to the outskirts of Cali, to escape violence near her home in the tropical grasslands, known as Los Llanos. This story is not uncommon. A decades-long conflict between armed groups and the government has displaced more than 5 million people across the country.  Doña Dora arrived with nothing, she told me that morning, as we watched hummingbirds flutter around a pair of freshly filled feeders like a collection of airborne jewels. She cleaned homes and sold empanadas on the side of the road. Her husband picked up odd jobs. Then one day she went to the dentist, and her life changed.  Her dentist, a man named Gilberto Collazos Bolaños, was a bird fanatic, and he knew the forest around her home was full of avian life. So he gave her a suggestion: Put some fruit on a table outside, and wait. The fruit will draw in birds, she remembers him saying, the birds will attract tourists, and the tourists will bring in money. She took his advice. And birds came. First there were bluebirds, golden tanagers, and colorful finches called euphonias. Then rarer species like rufous-throated tanagers and toucan barbets arrived. Toucan barbets are the unequivocal stars of the show. Found only in the mountain forests of western Colombia and Ecuador, they have a brilliant plumage — a collection of light gray, red, yellow, and black — and a song that sounds a bit like a frog. As the dentist predicted, birders eventually arrived, too, largely finding her home by word of mouth. And in 2015, Colombia hosted its first annual BirdFair, a major birding festival, and one of the event’s official field trips was a visit to Doña Dora’s home. That put her on the map, she told me.  “We always loved nature and trees,” said Doña Dora, who, when I visited, was wearing a head covering and what looked like a white lab coat. “But we didn’t have a vision for what we have right now, of birdwatching.” Today, her home is considered one of the country’s top birdwatching destinations, and some visitors have dubbed it “the best backyard birding spot in the world.” It’s this birding business that now supports her family.  Foreign tourists pay about $9 to view birds on her property ($13 if they have a camera). A room for two people is around $50 per night, which doesn’t include her coffee or her homemade empanadas. In the busy season, from September to March, the lodge will get more than 100 tourists a month, according to her son Elber Sanchez Londoño, who helps run the business. In her backyard that morning, I watched birds. But I also watched birdwatchers watch birds. I honestly found this activity just as thrilling.  What is it that makes some people so obsessed with birds? One explanation is that you can find them pretty much everywhere. That makes birdwatching easy to start and practice, no matter where you live. Birding can also connect you to a community. It tends to bring like-minded people together, both in person and through platforms like eBird and iNaturalist, where they can share their observations. Plus, it’s free and done outdoors, which is one reason why birding became so popular during the Covid-19 pandemic when people were avoiding crowded, indoor spaces. “It’s like an addiction,” Ocampo-Peñuela, a self-identified birder, told me. “You see these birds, and their beauty, and it just fills you with happy hormones. Then you want to do it more.” That morning, I met several tourists at Doña Dora’s lodge. Most of them toted cameras with long lenses. “This is unbelievable,” said Santiago Ferro, a visitor from Toronto, who grew up in Bogotá. I asked him how this spot compares to birding in North America. He just laughed. Birders are drawn to Colombia for its sheer number of avian species, many of which are found nowhere else. But the ongoing surge in birding tourism has far more to do with safety. Until recently, a conflict between the government and a number of armed groups spread violence across Colombia. At the center of the conflict — which began in the mid-20th century — was the distribution of wealth. The largest such group, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), fought against the government and right-wing paramilitary groups to bring more wealth to poor rural parts of Colombia. Violence tied to the conflict killed more than 200,000 people, and most of them were civilians. In 2016, after years of tense negotiations, the government and FARC signed a peace agreement. Put simply, the agreement required that FARC give up their weapons, stop fighting, and exit the drug trade, which was helping fund the conflict. In return they were offered political power and a promise to invest heavily in rural areas.  Violence still persists in some regions, especially near the borders, and the US State Department advises people to reconsider traveling to Colombia. Yet a tenuous truce holds. The peace agreement has made the country much safer, for locals and foreigners alike, than it has been for decades — and that, in turn, has opened the door to more birdwatching tourism.  In 2017, Ocampo-Peñuela published a study showing that birdwatching, as measured by activity on eBird, was already expanding in areas that were once considered dangerous, including Putumayo, a department in southern Colombia. Ocampo-Peñuela’s more recent research, which is not yet published, finds that birdwatching activity skyrocketed in Colombia after 2016, though it dipped during the pandemic. (A large portion of eBird users are from the US, so data from the platform over-represents American birding trends.) !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r&lt;e.length;r++)if(e[r].contentWindow===a.source){var i=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";e[r].style.height=i}}}))}(); The government doesn’t track birdwatching activity, though it says tourism overall is climbing. Last year, a record 6.1 million foreigners visited Colombia, up 30 percent from 2022, and the majority of them are looking for nature experiences, according to Procolombia, a government agency that markets the country. Tourism is already up this year compared to 2023, Procolombia told Vox. And since 2021, the number of nature lodges, including birding lodges, has nearly tripled, the agency said.  In global hot spots of biodiversity like Colombia, economic growth often comes at the expense of ecosystems. A growing cattle-ranching industry destroys rainforests. A mining boom leaches toxins into streams and soil. Comparatively, Colombia’s ballooning birdwatching industry seems like something to celebrate.  Tourism is not only funding birdwatching destinations like Doña Dora’s but building demand for local birdwatching guides. That’s created jobs for Colombians with deep ties to their surrounding ecosystems, whether or not they have a formal education. Generational knowledge of local birds and where to find them — referred to in some academic circles as traditional ecological knowledge — is increasingly valuable here, even in a straight economic sense. Birdwatching tourism gives it value. The following morning, I traveled to a place called Laguna de Sonso, a wetland just north of Cali. It’s a blip of natural habitat in a sea of sugarcane plantations, a widespread crop in Valle del Cauca. When I arrived, a cocoi heron, a large gray and white bird with a long, sharp beak, was wading in the water, sending ripples out across a lake. The wetland is a birder’s dream. More than 300 avian species live in or pass through Laguna de Sonso, including giants like the osprey and weirdos like the common potoo, a bird with an unsettlingly wide mouth. It’s also where youth from the surrounding communities learn to become birdwatching guides, or interpreters, as they call themselves. “We call ourselves interpreters because we are a community that has had empirical training,” said local guide Jhonathan Estiven Bedoya Betancourth, meaning they’ve learned through observation and experience. “We do not have, let's say, the training of a professional tourist guide.” (A pair of community organizations at Laguna de Sonso do offer workshops and mentorship for bird guiding.) Bedoya Betancourth, 24, says he’s been guiding birdwatching tours since he was 14. “We interpret everything that this beautiful territory has,” said Bedoya Betancourth, who wore a pair of binoculars around his neck.   Bedoya Betancourth started guiding because he loves birds, and he’s good at it. He can imitate the calls of around 30 species, he said. (I obviously asked him to demonstrate, and he impressively whistled the repetitive up-and-down call of a marsh bird called the gray-cowled wood-rail.) But it was also a way to earn money for his family, he said. He makes about $35 for each guiding trip, not including tip, and he’ll lead several trips a month. He supplements his income by making wood carvings to sell to tourists and locals.  “Birdwatching for me and for the group of interpreters is one of the economic activities that has been able to keep the community afloat,” said Maria Omaira Rendon Rayo, a community leader at Laguna de Sonso.  The birding economy gives people a reason to stay in the community, she said, and offers an alternative to careers that might attract violence, such as cultivating and selling drugs. By training kids, the laguna and its community organizations are also helping build a conservation ethic that will last for decades. “If you are receiving economic income from an activity such as conservation, then you want to conserve more,” said Rendon Rayo, who works with a local organization called Asociación de Productores Agropecuarios del Porvenir, which helps restore forests by planting trees and trains birding guides in Laguna de Sonso. “You want to help plant more trees. You want to help keep the laguna clean.” Nature tourism is not an unequivocal force of good. It actually often harms the environment, as researchers like Ralf Buckley have documented. Tourists have inadvertently introduced invasive species to places like the Galapagos Islands, snorkelers and divers have damaged coral, including in the Great Barrier Reef, and hotels are commonly built atop natural habitat. There’s also an exploitation issue: In many cases tourism companies are owned by foreigners, limiting the benefits that flow to local communities, on which they often depend. Plus, as a place swells with wealthy tourists, the cost of necessities like housing and food can rise, making it unlivable for locals.  Birdwatching tourism in Colombia has so far managed to avoid many of these pitfalls. It has some guardrails built in, Ocampo-Peñuela said. For one, birding doesn’t work well in large groups — they scare away birds and make it hard to spot something fluttering far away — and smaller groups have a lighter environmental impact. One of the lodges I visited capped the number of tourists to 10. Another said there are days when they will turn visitors away. What’s more is that finding rare and endemic species, which birders are most drawn to, typically requires local expertise. That helps keep money within local communities.  Then there’s the most important guardrail: Birdwatching tourism doesn’t work if it’s not sustainable. Even if you put out fruit, the birds won’t come if they have no habitat — no forest, no wetland. Birding is not like going to the zoo, where you can always expect to see animals. It’s in the economic interest of the birdwatching industry to make sure ecosystems remain healthy.  “You can’t do this business without conserving,” Javier Rubio, who runs another birdwatching destination, called La Florida, at his property northwest of Cali. “If you don't conserve, you put your future as a business at risk. If you start cutting down trees and damaging the forest, [the birds] will be left without food, which is the reason why they are here.” Doña Dora says one of her goals is to earn enough money so that her son can buy forested land around their home. He wants to conserve it, she told me. “That’s the idea for the future,” Elber, her son, told me, “to make sure that the birds continue to live in a healthy ecosystem.” The industry is still young, so the full extent of its environmental impact has yet to be seen. People involved in growing birdwatching tourism say it’s critical that Colombians, and especially people in rural, bird-filled regions, determine what the industry ultimately looks like. “It’s necessary that we Colombians define what kind of birdwatching tourism we want,” said Carlos Mario Wagner, the founder and director of Colombia BirdFair and one of the country’s most well-known birders.  Birding tourism shouldn’t just cater to foreigners, he said, but also to locals. “Something that makes me very happy is that Colombians are increasingly hiring guides,” Wagner told me. Birding has given Colombians an opportunity to reconnect with their homeland following the peace agreement, he said. It instills in them a sense of pride for a version of Colombia that’s known for nature, not violence. The birding industry will ultimately never be huge, Ocampo-Peñuela says. While it’s growing globally — faster than other forms of ecotourism, she’s found — it will likely remain niche, limited by the small number of people who want to travel to rural places to look at birds, often very early in the morning. “You have to have the right personality,” she told me.  So it’s not like birdwatching alone will fix Colombia’s problems and raise the rural class out of poverty.  Yet what it offers is incredibly special. Not just money for local communities, alternative career paths, and real incentives to save forests, but also something that’s harder to quantify. On a rainy afternoon in October, I visited Rubio at La Florida. Like Doña Dora, Rubio has a homemade bird feeder in his yard constructed with branches and pieces of fruit. It attracted a different cast of avian visitors. Here, the star was the multicolored tanager, a colorful species found only in the mountain forests of Colombia. My favorite, however, was the crimson-rumped toucanet, which is essentially a mini toucan. They’re bright green with rust-colored beaks that seem far too big for their bodies.  Over my fourth cup of black coffee, Rubio told me he was a criminal lawyer for nearly three decades before getting into the birdwatching business. A few years ago, he invited friends to his home to go birding. They saw the multicolored tanager and told him that his property — which abuts a tropical forest — has enormous potential to become a birdwatching destination.  Eager to live a more relaxing life, Rubio, 56, quit his job as a lawyer and started building a tourism business.  “I feel extremely good doing this,” Rubio told me. “I often feel like I’m giving happiness to people. Almost unanimously the people who come say, ‘This is a paradise.’ When you start birdwatching, you start to feel attracted not only to birds but to the peaceful environment of nature.” This is a point that nearly every birder I spoke to made: Caring about birds is a gateway to caring about nature, of seeing its true worth.  “It is a gradual process,” Rubio told me, as we sat on a covered deck as it rained, watching a multicolored tanager bounce around in the branches a few feet away. “You first contemplate them, then you begin to understand them, and then you begin to preserve them. That is the path taken by the one who takes up this habit of birdwatching.”

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. Haga clic aquí para leer esta historia en español. VALLE DEL CAUCA, Colombia — From the side of an old highway that cuts through the Andean foothills, Dora Alicia […]

A bright green toucanet with red beak is perched on a leafy branch with a plum hanging from it
A crimson-rumped toucanet at a popular birdwatching destination in southwestern Colombia called La Florida.


This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today. Haga clic aquí para leer esta historia en español.

VALLE DEL CAUCA, Colombia — From the side of an old highway that cuts through the Andean foothills, Dora Alicia Londoño’s home looks unremarkable. Located in a rural area about two hours from Cali, the largest city in southern Colombia, it’s a simple, two-story concrete building with a sheet metal roof. A few potted plants hang from the rafters. 

The main attraction is in her backyard. 

There, you will find birds. So many birds. And these are not just your common backyard varieties, like robins and bluejays, but rare forest species that birdwatchers around the world yearn to see.

Londoño, 63, has turned her home into a birdwatching lodge, a paradise. There are five guest rooms and a cafe with a view into her backyard, a dense tropical forest. There, she has a homemade bird feeder: wooden shelves holding pieces of fruit. Upstairs, on the roof, she had additional feeders for hummingbirds.

When I visited on a warm morning in October, it felt like stepping into a nature documentary. The backyard was teeming with birds, none of which I’d seen before: glistening green mountain tanagers, toucan barbets, lemon-browed flycatchers, velvet-purple coronets. These birds were so colorful they almost looked unreal, painting the yard with streaks of yellows, reds, blues, and purples. And then there was the noise — a clamor of cheeps, trills, and squawks.  

A hummingbird with vibrant blue, purple and green feathers

“The toucan barbet is one of the rarest birds in the world and it just eats bananas right here,” said Natalia Ocampo-Peñuela, a Colombian-born conservation ecologist and bird expert at the University of California Santa Cruz, who was at Londoño’s with me that morning. In an hour or so, I saw about 45 different species, Ocampo-Peñuela estimates, while leisurely sipping coffee and eating empanadas. If this is birdwatching, I’m in.

If you’re into birds, Colombia is the place to be. It has more avian species than any other country on Earth, with close to 2,000 distinct and often very beautiful varieties, nearly 20 percent of the world’s birds. That diversity is rooted in geography. Colombia is a mosaic of different habitats, from tropical rainforest to snow-capped mountains, and different birds have adapted to each of them. And as I experienced that morning, birding here can be incredibly easy. You don’t even need hiking shoes.

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This isn’t much of a secret. In the last decade, the activity of birdwatching has exploded in Colombia, said Ocampo-Peñuela, who also studies ecotourism. Activity on eBird, a platform where birders can record their observations, increased more than 27-fold in Colombia since 2010, according to unpublished research by Ocampo-Peñuela and other authors that’s currently under review. While the bulk of these birders are foreigners from places like the US and Canada, more and more Colombians are picking up the hobby, too, she said. 

A dark brown bird with light blue beak and yellow tail feathers stands on a brand while eating a banana

This burgeoning industry is, as many experts argue, a rare force of good. It’s funneling money into rural communities and creating material value for healthy forests — something the environmental movement has, for decades, struggled to do. Indeed, at a time when tropical forests and grasslands are besieged by farming, mining, and other threats, birdwatching tourism offers a real incentive to keep ecosystems intact. Without forests, there are no birds, no birders, and no birding tourism. 

There are, no doubt, concerns about sustainability as this young industry matures and more foreign tourists descend on Colombia. But for now, local communities are at the helm of this industry, which is good for people, good for the local economy, and good for wildlife. They intend to keep it that way.

Londoño, who goes by Doña Dora, didn’t dream of running a birdwatching lodge and welcoming tourists into her backyard. In the 1990s, she moved here, to the outskirts of Cali, to escape violence near her home in the tropical grasslands, known as Los Llanos. This story is not uncommon. A decades-long conflict between armed groups and the government has displaced more than 5 million people across the country. 

A woman sitting on a small brick wall with a green and purple painted bird mural behind her. She’s looking out at lush greenery to her left

Doña Dora arrived with nothing, she told me that morning, as we watched hummingbirds flutter around a pair of freshly filled feeders like a collection of airborne jewels. She cleaned homes and sold empanadas on the side of the road. Her husband picked up odd jobs.

Then one day she went to the dentist, and her life changed. 

Her dentist, a man named Gilberto Collazos Bolaños, was a bird fanatic, and he knew the forest around her home was full of avian life. So he gave her a suggestion: Put some fruit on a table outside, and wait. The fruit will draw in birds, she remembers him saying, the birds will attract tourists, and the tourists will bring in money.

She took his advice. And birds came. First there were bluebirds, golden tanagers, and colorful finches called euphonias. Then rarer species like rufous-throated tanagers and toucan barbets arrived. Toucan barbets are the unequivocal stars of the show. Found only in the mountain forests of western Colombia and Ecuador, they have a brilliant plumage — a collection of light gray, red, yellow, and black — and a song that sounds a bit like a frog.

As the dentist predicted, birders eventually arrived, too, largely finding her home by word of mouth. And in 2015, Colombia hosted its first annual BirdFair, a major birding festival, and one of the event’s official field trips was a visit to Doña Dora’s home. That put her on the map, she told me. 

“We always loved nature and trees,” said Doña Dora, who, when I visited, was wearing a head covering and what looked like a white lab coat. “But we didn’t have a vision for what we have right now, of birdwatching.”

Today, her home is considered one of the country’s top birdwatching destinations, and some visitors have dubbed it “the best backyard birding spot in the world.” It’s this birding business that now supports her family. 

Foreign tourists pay about $9 to view birds on her property ($13 if they have a camera). A room for two people is around $50 per night, which doesn’t include her coffee or her homemade empanadas. In the busy season, from September to March, the lodge will get more than 100 tourists a month, according to her son Elber Sanchez Londoño, who helps run the business.

In her backyard that morning, I watched birds. But I also watched birdwatchers watch birds. I honestly found this activity just as thrilling. 

two people in a forest looking through binoculars toward the sky

What is it that makes some people so obsessed with birds? One explanation is that you can find them pretty much everywhere. That makes birdwatching easy to start and practice, no matter where you live. Birding can also connect you to a community. It tends to bring like-minded people together, both in person and through platforms like eBird and iNaturalist, where they can share their observations. Plus, it’s free and done outdoors, which is one reason why birding became so popular during the Covid-19 pandemic when people were avoiding crowded, indoor spaces.

“It’s like an addiction,” Ocampo-Peñuela, a self-identified birder, told me. “You see these birds, and their beauty, and it just fills you with happy hormones. Then you want to do it more.”

That morning, I met several tourists at Doña Dora’s lodge. Most of them toted cameras with long lenses. “This is unbelievable,” said Santiago Ferro, a visitor from Toronto, who grew up in Bogotá. I asked him how this spot compares to birding in North America. He just laughed.

Birders are drawn to Colombia for its sheer number of avian species, many of which are found nowhere else. But the ongoing surge in birding tourism has far more to do with safety.

Until recently, a conflict between the government and a number of armed groups spread violence across Colombia. At the center of the conflict — which began in the mid-20th century — was the distribution of wealth. The largest such group, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), fought against the government and right-wing paramilitary groups to bring more wealth to poor rural parts of Colombia. Violence tied to the conflict killed more than 200,000 people, and most of them were civilians.

In 2016, after years of tense negotiations, the government and FARC signed a peace agreement. Put simply, the agreement required that FARC give up their weapons, stop fighting, and exit the drug trade, which was helping fund the conflict. In return they were offered political power and a promise to invest heavily in rural areas. 

Violence still persists in some regions, especially near the borders, and the US State Department advises people to reconsider traveling to Colombia. Yet a tenuous truce holds. The peace agreement has made the country much safer, for locals and foreigners alike, than it has been for decades — and that, in turn, has opened the door to more birdwatching tourism. 

In 2017, Ocampo-Peñuela published a study showing that birdwatching, as measured by activity on eBird, was already expanding in areas that were once considered dangerous, including Putumayo, a department in southern Colombia. Ocampo-Peñuela’s more recent research, which is not yet published, finds that birdwatching activity skyrocketed in Colombia after 2016, though it dipped during the pandemic. (A large portion of eBird users are from the US, so data from the platform over-represents American birding trends.)

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The government doesn’t track birdwatching activity, though it says tourism overall is climbing. Last year, a record 6.1 million foreigners visited Colombia, up 30 percent from 2022, and the majority of them are looking for nature experiences, according to Procolombia, a government agency that markets the country. Tourism is already up this year compared to 2023, Procolombia told Vox. And since 2021, the number of nature lodges, including birding lodges, has nearly tripled, the agency said. 

In global hot spots of biodiversity like Colombia, economic growth often comes at the expense of ecosystems. A growing cattle-ranching industry destroys rainforests. A mining boom leaches toxins into streams and soil. Comparatively, Colombia’s ballooning birdwatching industry seems like something to celebrate. 

Tourism is not only funding birdwatching destinations like Doña Dora’s but building demand for local birdwatching guides. That’s created jobs for Colombians with deep ties to their surrounding ecosystems, whether or not they have a formal education. Generational knowledge of local birds and where to find them — referred to in some academic circles as traditional ecological knowledge — is increasingly valuable here, even in a straight economic sense. Birdwatching tourism gives it value.

The following morning, I traveled to a place called Laguna de Sonso, a wetland just north of Cali. It’s a blip of natural habitat in a sea of sugarcane plantations, a widespread crop in Valle del Cauca. When I arrived, a cocoi heron, a large gray and white bird with a long, sharp beak, was wading in the water, sending ripples out across a lake.

The wetland is a birder’s dream. More than 300 avian species live in or pass through Laguna de Sonso, including giants like the osprey and weirdos like the common potoo, a bird with an unsettlingly wide mouth.

It’s also where youth from the surrounding communities learn to become birdwatching guides, or interpreters, as they call themselves. “We call ourselves interpreters because we are a community that has had empirical training,” said local guide Jhonathan Estiven Bedoya Betancourth, meaning they’ve learned through observation and experience. “We do not have, let's say, the training of a professional tourist guide.” (A pair of community organizations at Laguna de Sonso do offer workshops and mentorship for bird guiding.)

Bedoya Betancourth, 24, says he’s been guiding birdwatching tours since he was 14. “We interpret everything that this beautiful territory has,” said Bedoya Betancourth, who wore a pair of binoculars around his neck.  

A woman with bright red hair sits on a fallen tree within a forest next to water

Bedoya Betancourth started guiding because he loves birds, and he’s good at it. He can imitate the calls of around 30 species, he said. (I obviously asked him to demonstrate, and he impressively whistled the repetitive up-and-down call of a marsh bird called the gray-cowled wood-rail.) But it was also a way to earn money for his family, he said. He makes about $35 for each guiding trip, not including tip, and he’ll lead several trips a month. He supplements his income by making wood carvings to sell to tourists and locals. 

“Birdwatching for me and for the group of interpreters is one of the economic activities that has been able to keep the community afloat,” said Maria Omaira Rendon Rayo, a community leader at Laguna de Sonso. 

The birding economy gives people a reason to stay in the community, she said, and offers an alternative to careers that might attract violence, such as cultivating and selling drugs. By training kids, the laguna and its community organizations are also helping build a conservation ethic that will last for decades.

“If you are receiving economic income from an activity such as conservation, then you want to conserve more,” said Rendon Rayo, who works with a local organization called Asociación de Productores Agropecuarios del Porvenir, which helps restore forests by planting trees and trains birding guides in Laguna de Sonso. “You want to help plant more trees. You want to help keep the laguna clean.”

Nature tourism is not an unequivocal force of good. It actually often harms the environment, as researchers like Ralf Buckley have documented. Tourists have inadvertently introduced invasive species to places like the Galapagos Islands, snorkelers and divers have damaged coral, including in the Great Barrier Reef, and hotels are commonly built atop natural habitat. There’s also an exploitation issue: In many cases tourism companies are owned by foreigners, limiting the benefits that flow to local communities, on which they often depend. Plus, as a place swells with wealthy tourists, the cost of necessities like housing and food can rise, making it unlivable for locals. 

Birdwatching tourism in Colombia has so far managed to avoid many of these pitfalls. It has some guardrails built in, Ocampo-Peñuela said. For one, birding doesn’t work well in large groups — they scare away birds and make it hard to spot something fluttering far away — and smaller groups have a lighter environmental impact. One of the lodges I visited capped the number of tourists to 10. Another said there are days when they will turn visitors away.

What’s more is that finding rare and endemic species, which birders are most drawn to, typically requires local expertise. That helps keep money within local communities. 

Then there’s the most important guardrail: Birdwatching tourism doesn’t work if it’s not sustainable. Even if you put out fruit, the birds won’t come if they have no habitat — no forest, no wetland. Birding is not like going to the zoo, where you can always expect to see animals. It’s in the economic interest of the birdwatching industry to make sure ecosystems remain healthy. 

“You can’t do this business without conserving,” Javier Rubio, who runs another birdwatching destination, called La Florida, at his property northwest of Cali. “If you don't conserve, you put your future as a business at risk. If you start cutting down trees and damaging the forest, [the birds] will be left without food, which is the reason why they are here.”

Doña Dora says one of her goals is to earn enough money so that her son can buy forested land around their home. He wants to conserve it, she told me. “That’s the idea for the future,” Elber, her son, told me, “to make sure that the birds continue to live in a healthy ecosystem.”

The industry is still young, so the full extent of its environmental impact has yet to be seen. People involved in growing birdwatching tourism say it’s critical that Colombians, and especially people in rural, bird-filled regions, determine what the industry ultimately looks like. “It’s necessary that we Colombians define what kind of birdwatching tourism we want,” said Carlos Mario Wagner, the founder and director of Colombia BirdFair and one of the country’s most well-known birders. 

Birding tourism shouldn’t just cater to foreigners, he said, but also to locals. “Something that makes me very happy is that Colombians are increasingly hiring guides,” Wagner told me. Birding has given Colombians an opportunity to reconnect with their homeland following the peace agreement, he said. It instills in them a sense of pride for a version of Colombia that’s known for nature, not violence.

The birding industry will ultimately never be huge, Ocampo-Peñuela says. While it’s growing globally — faster than other forms of ecotourism, she’s found — it will likely remain niche, limited by the small number of people who want to travel to rural places to look at birds, often very early in the morning. “You have to have the right personality,” she told me. 

So it’s not like birdwatching alone will fix Colombia’s problems and raise the rural class out of poverty. 

Yet what it offers is incredibly special. Not just money for local communities, alternative career paths, and real incentives to save forests, but also something that’s harder to quantify.

A man holding binoculars stands on a wooden platform with greenery surrounding

On a rainy afternoon in October, I visited Rubio at La Florida. Like Doña Dora, Rubio has a homemade bird feeder in his yard constructed with branches and pieces of fruit. It attracted a different cast of avian visitors. Here, the star was the multicolored tanager, a colorful species found only in the mountain forests of Colombia. My favorite, however, was the crimson-rumped toucanet, which is essentially a mini toucan. They’re bright green with rust-colored beaks that seem far too big for their bodies. 

Over my fourth cup of black coffee, Rubio told me he was a criminal lawyer for nearly three decades before getting into the birdwatching business. A few years ago, he invited friends to his home to go birding. They saw the multicolored tanager and told him that his property — which abuts a tropical forest — has enormous potential to become a birdwatching destination. 

Eager to live a more relaxing life, Rubio, 56, quit his job as a lawyer and started building a tourism business. 

“I feel extremely good doing this,” Rubio told me. “I often feel like I’m giving happiness to people. Almost unanimously the people who come say, ‘This is a paradise.’ When you start birdwatching, you start to feel attracted not only to birds but to the peaceful environment of nature.”

This is a point that nearly every birder I spoke to made: Caring about birds is a gateway to caring about nature, of seeing its true worth. 

“It is a gradual process,” Rubio told me, as we sat on a covered deck as it rained, watching a multicolored tanager bounce around in the branches a few feet away. “You first contemplate them, then you begin to understand them, and then you begin to preserve them. That is the path taken by the one who takes up this habit of birdwatching.”

Read the full story here.
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Don’t Think Too Hard About Gum

When you chew gum, you’re essentially gnawing on plastic.

At the turn of the 20th century, William Wrigley Jr. was bent on building an empire of gum, and as part of his extensive hustle, he managed to persuade the U.S. Department of War to include his products in soldiers’ rations. His argument—baseless at the time—was that chewing gum had miraculous abilities to quench thirst, stave off hunger, and dissipate nervous tension. But he was right: Scientists have since found that gum chewing can indeed increase concentration, reduce the impulse to snack, alleviate thirst, and improve oral health.Perhaps that’s why people around the world have had the impulse to gnaw on tacky materials—roots, resins, twigs, blubber, tar made by burning birch bark—for at least 8,000 years. Today, gum is again being marketed as a panacea for wellness. You can buy gum designed to deliver energy, nutrition, stress relief, or joint health; scientists are even developing gums that can protect against influenza, herpes, and COVID. Ironically, this new era of chewing gum is manufactured with a distinctly modern ingredient, one not usually associated with wellness: plastic.By the time Wrigley began his business venture, Americans had grown accustomed to chewing gum sold as candy-coated balls or packaged sticks. The base of these chewing gums was made from natural substances such as spruce resin and chicle, a natural latex that Aztecs and Mayans chewed for hundreds if not thousands of years. Unfortunately for 20th-century Americans, the chicozapote trees that exude chicle take a long time to grow, and if they are overtapped, they die. Plus, cultivated trees don’t produce nearly as much chicle as wild trees, says Jennifer Mathews, an anthropology professor at Trinity University and the author of Chicle. In the 1950s, chicle harvesters began struggling to meet demand. So gum companies turned to the newest innovations in materials science: synthetic rubbers and plastics.Today, most companies’ gum base is a proprietary blend of synthetic and natural ingredients: If a packet lists “gum base” as an ingredient, that gum most likely contains synthetic polymers. The FDA allows gum base to contain any of dozens of approved food-grade materials—substances deemed either safe for human consumption or safe to be in contact with food. Many, though, are not substances that people would otherwise think to put in their mouth. They include polyethylene (the most common type of plastic, used in plastic bags and milk jugs), polyvinyl acetate (a plastic also found in glue), and styrene-butadiene rubber (commonly used in car tires). The typical gum base contains two to four types of synthetic plastics or rubbers, Gwendolyn Graff, a confectionery consultant, told me.Everything we love about gum today is thanks to synthetic polymers, Graff said. Polyvinyl acetate, for example, strengthens the bubble film. “If you blow a bubble, and it starts to get holes in it and deflate, that’s usually an indicator that it doesn’t have polyvinyl acetate,” Graff said. Styrene-butadiene rubber creates a bouncy chewiness that makes gum more likely to stick to itself rather than to surfaces like your teeth. Polyethylene can be used to soften gum so it doesn’t tire out your jaw. Gums with only natural polymers “can feel like they're going to fall apart in your mouth,” Graff said.Plastic gum, though, also falls apart, in a way: Gum chewing has been linked to microplastic ingestion. In a study published in December, U.K. researchers had a volunteer chew on a piece of gum for an hour, spitting into test tubes as they went. After an hour of gum chewing, the saliva collected contained more than 250,000 pieces of micro and nano plastics—comparable to the level of microplastics found in a liter of bottled water. In a study presented at a recent meeting of the American Chemical Society (which has not yet been peer-reviewed), a graduate student’s saliva contained elevated microplastic levels after she chewed several commercially available gums, including natural ones. The research on gum chewing and microplastics is still limited—these two papers effectively represent analysis of just two people’s post-chew saliva—but gum chewing has also been correlated with higher urine levels of phthalates, plastic-softening chemicals that are known endocrine disruptors.Scientists are still learning about the health impacts of microplastic ingestion, too. Microplastics find their way into all kinds of foods from packaging or contamination during manufacturing, or because the plants and animals we eat absorb and ingest microplastics themselves. As a result, microplastics have been found in human livers, kidneys, brains, lungs, intestines, placentas, and breast milk, but exactly how our bodies absorb, disperse, and excrete ingested plastic is not very well studied, says Marcus Garcia, who researches the health effects of environmental contaminants at the University of New Mexico. Some research in mice and cultured cells hint that microplastics have the potential to cause damage, and epidemiological research suggests that microplastics are associated with respiratory, digestive, and reproductive issues, as well as colon and lung cancer. But scientists are still trying to understand whether or how microplastics cause disease, which microplastics are most dangerous to human health, and how much microplastic the body can take before seeing any negative effects.The answer could affect the future of what we choose to eat—or chew. Ingesting tiny plastic particles might seem inevitable, but over the past 10 years or so, Americans have grown understandably fearful about bits of plastic making their way into our food, fretting about microwaving food in plastic containers and drinking from plastic bottles. Gum has, for the most part, not triggered those worries, but in recent years, its popularity had been dropping for other reasons. In a bid to reverse that trend, gum companies are marketing synthetic gum as a tool for wellness. Just like Wrigley, they are betting that Americans will believe in the power of gum to soothe nerves and heal ailments, and that they won’t think too hard about what modern gum really is. For anyone worried about swallowing still more plastic, after all, gum is easy enough to avoid.

A marine biologist discovered something incredible in a beer bottle on the seafloor

This story was produced in collaboration with The Dodo. One morning this week, Hanna Koch was snorkeling in the Florida Keys when she came across a brown beer bottle on the sea floor. Koch, a marine biologist for Florida’s Monroe County, picked up the bottle, planning to carry it with her and later toss it […]

This story was produced in collaboration with The Dodo. One morning this week, Hanna Koch was snorkeling in the Florida Keys when she came across a brown beer bottle on the sea floor. Koch, a marine biologist for Florida’s Monroe County, picked up the bottle, planning to carry it with her and later toss it out.  Through her dive mask, Koch peered inside to make sure it was empty.  That’s when she saw an eyeball.  “There was something staring back at me,” Koch told me.  It wasn’t just one eyeball, actually — but dozens. Inside the bottle was an octopus mom with a brood of babies. “You could see their eyes, you could see their tentacles,” Koch said in a recent interview with Vox and The Dodo. “They were fully formed.” Instead of taking the bottle with her and throwing it away like she initially intended, Koch handed it to her colleague, another marine biologist, who carefully placed it back on the sandy sea floor. Based on the images and video, Chelsea Bennice, a marine biologist at Florida Atlantic University, said the animal was likely a species of pygmy octopus — making this whole encounter even cuter.  On one hand, it’s hopeful to find life — an octopus family! — living in rubbish. “One man’s trash is another octopuse’s nursery,” as University of Miami environmental scientist Jennifer Jacquet told me when I showed her the photos. Her graduate student, Janelle Kaz, said it’s actually not uncommon for octopuses to take up residence in beer bottles. “They are highly curious and opportunistic,” Jacquet said.  But it’s also a reminder that, as Florida ecosystems decline, there are fewer and fewer places for wildlife to live. Overfishing, pollution, and climate change have devastated near-shore habitats in the Keys — and especially coral reefs — in the last few decades.  The irony, Koch told me, is that she runs a state-funded project in Monroe County to create “artificial reefs:” structures, often made of concrete, to enhance the habitat for fish, lobsters, and other sea creatures. And she was actually snorkeling that morning to figure out where to put some of the structures.  “This octopus found artificial habitat to make its home,” Koch said. “I was just like, ‘Wait momma, because I’m going to put out some better habitat for you — something that someone can’t pick up and throw away.’”

Sea Lion Bites Surfer Amid One of the Worst Outbreaks of Domoic Acid Poisoning That California Wildlife Rescuers Can Remember

Sea lions, dolphins and birds are sick and dying because of a toxic algae bloom in Southern California—and animal care organizations are overwhelmed by the scale

Volunteers with the Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute in Santa Barbara, California, rescue a sick sea lion that's likely suffering from domoic acid poisoning. David Swanson / AFP via Getty Images It started as a normal surf session for RJ LaMendola. He was roughly 150 yards from the beach in Southern California, riding the waves and enjoying the peaceful solitude. But the situation quickly turned violent when a sea lion emerged from the water and charged at LaMendola. The 20-year surfing veteran tried to remain calm as he frantically paddled back to shore, but the sea lion was behaving unusually—“like some deranged predator,” LaMendola wrote in a widely shared post on Facebook. The sea lion made contact, delivering a hard bite on LaMendola’s left buttock that pierced through his wetsuit. “Never have I had one charge me, especially at that ferocity, mouth open,” LaMendola tells the Ventura County Star’s Stacie N. Galang and Cheri Carlson. “It really was out of, like, a horror movie.” Eventually, LaMendola made it back to the sand and drove himself to a nearby emergency room. After being treated, he contacted local wildlife authorities. The most likely explanation for the sea lion’s abnormally aggressive behavior? The creature was probably suffering from domoic acid poisoning, which results from toxic algae blooms. Across Southern California, authorities are grappling with one of the worst outbreaks of domoic acid poisoning they’ve ever seen. Dozens of sea lions and dolphins have been affected by the condition in recent weeks, reports the Los Angeles Times’ Summer Lin. Birds are also turning up dead, according to the Los Angeles Daily News’ Erika I. Ritchie. At least 140 sick sea lions are being cared for at the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, per the Los Angeles Times, because they have a 50 to 65 percent chance of surviving if they receive treatment. Roughly another 45 are being cared for at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center in Laguna Beach, reports the Los Angeles Daily News. SeaWorld San Diego has rescued another 15 this year, reports KGTV’s Jane Kim. Other sea lions have been found dead on area beaches. “This morning, we had three calls within 30 minutes of daylight breaking,” Glenn Gray, CEO of the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, told the Los Angeles Daily News on March 18. “That’s the magnitude of it.” Members of the public are being urged to report any sick, distressed or dead animals they find on the beach. Beachgoers should also stay away from the animals and give them space. David Swanson / AFP via Getty Images Dozens of dolphins, meanwhile, are washing up dead or close to death on beaches. Veterinarians are euthanizing the dolphins, because they rarely survive domoic acid poisoning, per the Los Angeles Times. “It’s the only humane option,” says John Warner, CEO of the Marine Mammal Care Center, to the Westside Current’s Jamie Paige. “It’s an awful situation.” A similar outbreak occurred in 2023, killing more than 1,000 sea lions. But officials say this year is shaping up to be worse. The harmful algae bloom started roughly five weeks ago. During a bloom, environmental conditions cause microscopic phytoplankton to proliferate. Some species of phytoplankton produce domoic acid, which then accumulates in filter-feeding fish and shellfish. Marine mammals become sickened when they eat the affected fish and shellfish. (Humans can also get sick from eating contaminated fish, shellfish and crustaceans.) In marine mammals, symptoms of domoic acid poisoning include seizures, lethargy, foaming at the mouth and a neck-craning behavior known as “stargazing.” Biting incidents—like the one LaMendola endured—are rare, but sickened animals have been known to behave aggressively. “The neurotoxin is crippling and killing sea lions and dolphins,” says Ruth Dover, managing director of the nonprofit Channel Islands Marine & Wildlife Institute, to the Ventura County Star. The bloom likely started when cold water from deep in the Pacific Ocean rose to the surface in February. Now, it also appears to be spreading closer to the shore. Researchers are monitoring the bloom, but so far, they have no indication of how long it will last. Authorities say toxic algae blooms are getting worse and happening more frequently because of climate change, agricultural runoff and other human-caused factors. This is the fourth straight year a domoic acid-producing bloom has developed off Southern California, as Dave Bader, chief operating officer of the Marine Mammal Care Center, tells KNX News’ Karen Adams. “We don’t know what the long-term impacts will be for having so many consecutive years of this toxic bloom,” Bader adds. “But [dolphins are] a sentinel species. They’re telling us about the health of the ocean, and when we see marine life dying, and we’re seeing it in increasing levels with more frequency, the ocean’s telling us something’s off.” The ongoing outbreak is taking its toll on Southern California veterinarians, volunteers and beachgoers. The incidents are particularly heartbreaking for lifeguards, who typically comfort dying dolphins—and keep beachgoers away—until authorities can arrive. Members of the public are encouraged to report any distressed, sick or dead animals they find on the beach. And, more importantly, they should leave the animals alone. Authorities say pushing a sick creature back into the ocean will likely cause it to drown. Dolphins also become especially agitated when they’re out of the water and people are around—to the point that they can die from fear. “People need to leave them alone and not crowd around them,” Warner tells the Los Angeles Times. “Selfies kill animals, so use your zoom, and stay away.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Deep Sea Mining Impacts Still Felt Forty Years On, Study Shows

By David StanwaySINGAPORE (Reuters) - A strip of the Pacific Ocean seabed that was mined for metals more than 40 years ago has still not recovered,...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A strip of the Pacific Ocean seabed that was mined for metals more than 40 years ago has still not recovered, scientists said late on Wednesday, adding weight to calls for a moratorium on all deep sea mining activity during U.N.-led talks this week.A 2023 expedition to the mineral-rich Clarion Clipperton Zone by a team of scientists led by Britain's National Oceanography Centre found that the impacts of a 1979 test mining experiment were still being felt on the seafloor, a complex ecosystem hosting hundreds of species.The collection of small "polymetallic nodules" from an eight-metre strip of the seabed caused long-term sediment changes and reduced the populations of many of the larger organisms living there, though some smaller, more mobile creatures have recovered, according to the study, published in Nature journal."The evidence provided by this study is critical for understanding potential long-term impacts," said NOC expedition leader Daniel Jones. "Although we saw some areas with little or no recovery, some animal groups were showing the first signs of recolonisation and repopulation."Delegations from 36 countries are attending a council meeting of the U.N.'s International Seabed Authority in Kingston, Jamaica this week to decide whether mining companies should be allowed to extract metals like copper or cobalt from the ocean floor.As they deliberate over hundreds of proposed amendments to a 256-page draft mining code, environmental groups have called for mining activities to be halted, a move supported by 32 governments and 63 large companies and financial institutions."This latest evidence makes it even more clear why governments must act now to stop deep sea mining before it ever starts," said Greenpeace campaigner Louise Casson.While few expect a final text to be completed by the time the latest round of talks ends on March 28, Canada's The Metals Company plans to submit the first formal mining application in June.On Friday, delegates will discuss what actions should be taken if an application to mine is submitted before the regulations have been completed.TMC said at a briefing last week that it had a legal right to submit an application at any time and hoped that the ISA would bring clarity to the application process.TMC says the environmental impact of deep sea mining is significantly smaller than conventional terrestrial mining."You just have to move a lot less material to get the same amount of metal - higher grade means better economics, but also means lower environmental impacts," said Craig Shesky, TMC's chief financial officer.(Reporting by David Stanway; Editing by Saad Sayeed)Copyright 2025 Thomson Reuters.

In the hills of Italy, wolves returned from the brink. Then the poisonings began

Strict laws saved the country’s wolves from extinction. Now conservationists believe their relaxation could embolden vigilantesHigh on a mountain pass near the town of Cocullo in central Italy lay six black sacks. Inside were nine wolves, including a pregnant female and seven youngsters – an entire pack. They had eaten slabs of poisoned veal left out a few days earlier, dying over the hours that followed, snarls of pain fixed on their faces.Three griffon vultures and two ravens were also killed, probably alongside more animals that went into hiding, dying out of sight. Poison creates a succession of death, spreading through entire food chains and contaminating land and water for years. Continue reading...

High on a mountain pass near the town of Cocullo in central Italy lay six black sacks. Inside were nine wolves, including a pregnant female and seven youngsters – an entire pack. They had eaten slabs of poisoned veal left out a few days earlier, dying over the hours that followed, snarls of pain fixed on their faces.Three griffon vultures and two ravens were also killed, probably alongside more animals that went into hiding, dying out of sight. Poison creates a succession of death, spreading through entire food chains and contaminating land and water for years.The incident in 2023, was described as “culturally medieval” by national park authorities. “It was a bad day for the whole team,” says Nicolò Borgianni, a vulture field officer with Rewilding Apennines, who still remembers what a beautiful May day it was when the animals perished: alpine flowers poking through the grass and snow still dusting mountain peaks on the horizon from the 1,300-metre viewpoint. “But there are many cases like this one.”The bags containing nine wolves poisoned in Cocullo. No one was prosecuted for the deaths. Photograph: HandoutLike all poisoning events in this area, no one was prosecuted. The corpses were disposed of and life moved on. Now the ground is grubbed up from wild boars digging their snouts in the dirt looking for bulbs to eat.Downgrading wolf protection is a misguided decision. It offers no real help to rural communitiesIn the 1970s, wolves were on the brink of extinction in Italy, but thanks to strict protections and conservation efforts, there are now more than 3,000 of them. In many areas of Europe, farmers are having to learn to live alongside wolves again as they return to places they have been absent from for hundreds of years – and many are concerned that they prey on livestock. The story unfolding in this small valley in Italy is being repeated all over Europe. “Farmers feel abandoned by government, so they solve their problems on their own,” says Borgianni.From March 2025, the EU is relaxing its protections from “strictly protected” to “protected”, which means if wolves are perceived as a threat to rural communities, states can organise culls. Poisonings such as the one in Cocullo will remain illegal, but conservationists fear the relaxation of protections will empower vigilantes.Angela Tavone, a communications manager from Rewilding Apennines, is worried this will create more “chains of death” like the one two years ago. “Groups of farmers can feel more free to act against wolves because of the change in the EU law,” she says.Angela Tavone and Nicolò Borgianni inspect a horse skull. Photograph: Luigi Filice/The GuardianWhoever killed the wolf pack in 2023 failed to keep wolves away. Months later, another pack moved in. Nearly two years later, on that same spot, there are half a dozen wolf droppings, some just a few weeks old. The pack’s territory overlaps with mountain pastures used for cattle and sheep in spring and summer. Wild boar makes up most of the wolves’ diet here, but you can also spot hairs from cows or horses in the droppings. Borgianni estimates about 10% of their diet is livestock. One pack monitored by scientists in the region appeared to be eating closer to 70% during winter.Vultures are often the sentinels of a poisoning event. The Apennines has the highest number of GPS-tagged vultures in a single population, so observers know something is wrong if their tags stop moving. “If you investigate, you find these incidents,” says Borgianni. They are social animals and up to 60 birds can feed on a single carcass, so dozens can be wiped out quickly. Since 2021 the Rewilding Apennines team has picked up 85 carcasses across all species.An Apennine wolf pup carrying part of a red deer in Abruzzo, Italy. One poisoning event can kill a whole pack. Photograph: Nature Picture Library/AlamyPredator poisoning is an issue across Europe – and the world – but we know little about the extent of it, because animals generally die out of sight. Farmers say these apex predators threaten their livelihoods – and resolving the conflicts is complex.Down in the valley, Cristian Guido’s family farm and restaurant Il Castellaccio back on to fresh mountain pastures. Twenty years ago, when he started farming, there were not many wolves around. Two nights ago, CCTV cameras captured a pair of wolves wandering through the yard. Guido can sometimes hear them howling from the woods by the farm.Cristian Guido at his family farm and restaurant. Photograph: Luigi Filice/The GuardianFrom May, his 90 sheep go up into the hills every day to fatten on the succulent grasses, and come down in the evenings. One day last October, 18 of them didn’t come back. Guido believes wolves were to blame, perhaps chasing the sheep off a cliff.I find wolves beautiful, but I keep asking for help. It is just not possible to keep them awayThere was no evidence they had been killed by a wolf (there often is not) so he got no compensation. Now, when he takes his animals up in the morning, he doesn’t know if they will all come back. “I fear that will happen again,” he says.He is not alone. “Other farms suffered the same loss,” he says. In the past few years, half a dozen dead wolves have been hung up by roads and bus stops by people protesting at their return.“I find wolves beautiful, but I keep asking for help. It is just not possible to keep them away. And I’m aware if you shoot them, you will get more and more damage,” he says. Guido believes protections for wolves should not have been downgraded, but that farmers must be given more support.The bones of a horse in ⁨Cocullo⁩, ⁨Abruzzo. Photograph: Luigi Filice/The GuardianThis would include making compensation easier to claim and quicker to be distributed. There should be more support for farmers constructing wolf-proof fences near their properties, he believes.Research this year looking at wolf-farmer conflicts in northern Greece found wolves were often scapegoats for deep-rooted issues, such as financial challenges, poor government policies on protection of livelihoods, a changing climate, lack of services and rural depopulation. “Our findings emphasise that while wolves impact farmers, economic and policy-related factors play a greater role,” the researchers concluded. The study found fair compensation schemes were essential for coexistence.These findings are echoed by a coalition of NGOs, including BirdLife Europe, ClientEarth and the European Environmental Bureau, which say that instead of providing support for farmers living alongside wolves, the EU has allowed them to be culled. “Downgrading wolf protection is a misguided decision that prioritises political gains over science and will further polarise the debate,” say the NGOs. “It offers no real help to rural communities.”Virginia Sciore is a farmer with 150 goats grazing on pastures in the Morrone mountains. Since 2018 she has lost five goats. “You can see in the eyes of the goats they are terrified – something happened in the mountain,” she says. Sometimes, she finds a collar or tuft of hair, but usually they disappear without a trace, so she doesn’t claim compensation. “I don’t know if it was a wolf,” she says.“The majority of farmers don’t believe in coexistence,” Sciore says. “They have stories about wolves that have been imported. They want to believe these things. People are angry and it’s projected on to the wolf.”Virginia Sciore has lost five of her 150 goats since 2018. Photograph: Angela Tavone/Rewilding ApenninesThe conflict over wolves comes amid a wider shift away from environmental protections across Europe. Last year, EU leaders scaled back plans to cut pollution and protect habitats after angry protests from farmers, as a law to restore nature was turned into a political punching bag. “It’s a low moment historically to face this issue,” says Tavone.The Cucollo incident was a turning point for the Rewilding Apennines team. In response, they created their first anti-poison dog unit. A malinois dog called Wild – who at six months old is still in training – will, in the coming months, sniff out potential poisoning incidents.As spring approaches, so too does the most dangerous time for poisoning events, as farmers look to protect young and vulnerable livestock. Catching poisoning incidents quickly is key – and Wild will help with that. Those fighting to protect wildlife are increasing their efforts. “The war is still going on,” says Tavone.The mountains around Cocullo⁩. As spring approaches, poisoning events usually spike as farmers try to protect young animals. Photograph: Luigi Filice/The Guardian

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