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| BATON ROUGE – LSU Ph.D. candidate and Honduras bird authority David Anderson has taken a crucial leadership role in an international coalition responsible for rediscovering and developing conservation strategies for a bird with an interesting history – the Honduran Emerald hummingbird. “The Honduran Emerald hummingbird had not been sighted in Western Honduras for more than 70 years,” said Anderson. “Because it is not just the only bird restricted solely to Honduras but also the most critically endangered bird in Central America, learning more about the species and its habitat is crucial to protecting the species.” Anderson and an international group of conservationists came together in 2007 through the efforts of American explorer and philanthropist Robert Hyman, who felt that a conservation expedition was a positive way that he could use his talents in expeditionary science. He cultivated the international team and brought them all together for fieldwork in Honduras. The project started with overflights in single-engine aircraft in search of suitable habitat. “We all crowded onto these planes carrying GPS equipment and laptops and just started looking for the kind of terrain that appeared suitable for Emerald habitat,” said Anderson. “The overflights alone took two entire days to complete.” Anderson and his colleagues then gathered all the data and prioritized areas based on the likelihood of the habitats viewed from the air being suitable for Emeralds, and then they hit the ground running. Anderson himself was responsible for developing the search protocol used by the team once they physically entered the field. “We were very successful,” he said. “In 2007, we found a new population in Eastern Honduras, near where a historic population was already known. In 2008, we returned to Western Honduras, where we found the Emerald at six of 14 sites surveyed. From this finding, we have increased both the known population size and extent of available habitat.” But there is one impending threat to this positive development that Anderson and his colleagues are working to offset. Currently, there is an international project underway to build power lines all the way through Central America. Officials recently came to the conclusion that the projected path of these power lines would cut directly through the newly discovered habitat of the Honduran Emerald. “Thankfully, the company is being very proactive about the situation and realizes that this would have devastating results,” said Anderson. “We are currently in talks with them to develop a plan that would allow them to move forward without delay but also without any negative ramifications on the bird population.” The group has proposed a nine-point plan that includes habitat conservation, educational outreach and, perhaps most interesting of all, initiatives to promote and build fuel-efficient wood burning stoves, which are used by many of the villagers near the Honduran Emerald habitat, to cut wood usage by up to 60 percent. “People there still use clay ovens that have no real design elements, just a hole to put wood into and another for smoke to come out of,” said Anderson. “They’re not efficient at all, and so require a significant amount of firewood. If we were able to adjust this even slightly, the impact on annual deforestation would be huge.” In addition to a precarious future, the Honduran Emerald has a somewhat mysterious past that makes learning about it today even more appealing to ornithologists. “The species was first discovered in the 1800s, but when it was first described, its exact locality and habitat were not mentioned on the specimen label,” said Anderson. “Ten more specimens were collected prior to 1950, but again, none had good locality or habitat data, so for the first 100 years or so of its known existence, no one knew exactly where the Honduran Emerald lived.” LSU’s Museum of Natural Science, heralded for having one of the largest university collections of birds in the United States, has a Honduran Emerald specimen from 1937, but its label, too, is confusing. “We don’t know if there was a mistranslation or just misinformation involved, but the location listed on the original identifying material has never – to our knowledge – existed,” said Anderson. For more information on the Honduran Emerald or the ongoing conservation efforts surrounding the species, contact David Anderson at 225-578-5393 or danders@tigers.lsu.edu. -30- |
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