education: shade-grown coffee

Showing posts with label shade-grown coffee. Show all posts

Sunday, April 24, 2011

More Shade Coffee Birds

A chestnut-sided warbler happily hunted the coffee shrubs

cocking her tail and drooping her wings as CSWA's like to do.

She was joined by a young American redstart

white-eyed vireos, and the omnipresent black-throated green warblers who got all up in my face and said howdy.

The toucan is not the only acrobatic bird around here.

I can hang upside down. And I will, until you tell all your coffee-drinking friends (that's, like everybody I know) to spring for shade-grown, bird-friendly coffee. You can buy Birds and Beans coffee here. It's certified as Bird Friendly by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, and it's 100% organic. And I don't get a cut...I'm a believer, and I hope these photos will make you one, too.

Thank you very much.

From the looks of these leaves, I'm thinking there wasn't much spraying going on in the Finca Las Glorias plantations. Did you know that warblers key into insect damage when they're foraging? It's like following the tracks of their prey.

Parrots in flight, like these white-fronted Amazons, are really hard to photograph. But I like what I got--it evokes the screaming and the bullet-like exit. Perhaps they've had the same welcome as the toucans in this plantation.

To my surprise, the plantation workers were chopping off perfectly good looking coffee plants to just this high, a few inches off the ground. This one didn't survive the chopping and was growing some terrific looking lavender shelf fungi. But most of the rest did. The reason they chop the shrubs almost to the ground is that when they get too tall, the workers can't reach the beans to pick them, so they have to keep hacking the plant back so it makes new growth that's nice and short.

Then they throw the shrubs in the rows between the hacked-off stumps, essentially mulching the plants with their own corpses.

An exquisite clear-winged butterfly, sort of a fly-meets butterfly effect. Woweee.

And some mating skippers, I know not which kind, but there's substantial sexual dimorphism between them.

I kept hearing the most amazing whooshing sound, like fighter jets, so I moved out into the open to see what it was. It was black vultures! They were riding a thermal way up high, and when they got high enough they'd half-fold their wings and come whooshing down like storm troopers, one after another. It looked like such fun! I wish I had a recording of the sound. Birds play, too.

A summer tanager bid me goodbye after a wonderful day in the shade coffee plantations.

With the pleasant highland weather, the dappled sun and the abundance of birds, I was thrilled to be there, alone, soaking it all in.

Buy bird-friendly shade-grown coffee. Better yet, go to Honduras and see where it comes from. And tell the black-throated greens you heard it from me.

Colene and Bill McKee share a moment in a paradise for birdwatchers.

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.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Shade-Grown Coffee Birds

So many birds flitted and foraged through the shade-grown coffee plantation it was hard to focus on any one, but this black-throated green warbler got right up in my grille, so he won for awhile. I took so few truly decent bird photos in Honduras, thanks to rain and generally dark conditions, that I reveled in having a cooperative subject in good light.

Ironically, I wouldn't have been in this shade coffee plantation had I not been struck by Montezuma's Revenge (probably from brushing my teeth in tap water, duh duh duh).

Why did I think toothpaste had antibacterial properties? It doesn't. So y'all, when you travel in Latin America, brush your teeth and rinse your toothbrush in bottled water. And take Immodium with you.

At any rate, I was actually happy to stay behind from the field trips at the first MesoAmerican Birding Festival, and potter around (well, that's an unfortunate choice of words) near the hotel.

I was floored by the beauty of this keel-billed toucan with the sun coming through his underdrawers.

He showed off that acrobatic toucan stuff I love so much. Two other birders staying at Hotel Las Glorias witnessed workers in the shade coffee plantation using slingshots to shoot large rocks at the toucans overhead, which may explain why this bird was scolding me so lustily. I was horrified when I was told that one had succeeded in hitting a toucan in flight, which dropped several feet but kept flying. Their intent? To injure one and bring it to earth, where they could catch it and sell it to a zoo or for a pet.

What greater abomination could you visit on a bird of the treetops and hot blue sky? Displayed for sale in the gift shop at Hotel Las Glorias were slingshots exactly like those I saw tucked into the knapsacks of its coffee plantation workers. Honduras, as a country, needs to be shown that its birds are worth far, far more on the wing than in filthy cages. If you go, and I hope you do, check that gift shop and ask the proprietors why they have slingshots for sale, if they still do. We did, and our festival participants made a lot of noise about their toucan-shooting employees. We made it clear that's not cool if you want to cater to birdwatchers. Bad form for a host hotel of a birding festival.

I hope this big beautiful bird still has the sun shining through his wondrous bill.

Another malevolently sweet ferruginous pygmy-owl basked in rare sunshine on a long branch.

I watched and waited, wanting to photograph the back of its head.

Finally I got a profile, but not quite what I was after.

Here's the best I could do. FEPO's, like several other small owls, have marvelous false eye spots on the back of their heads. The "eye" even has a white eyebrow! This is thought to help the little owl when it's being mobbed by other birds--maybe they back off if they think both sides of its head are looking at them. Because the FEPO includes songbirds in its diet, it's not well-liked among the feathered tribe, and being a diurnal hunter, it gets a lot of mobbing grief from its prey.

That prey might include "our" magnolia warblers, which are common as beans in the shade coffee plantations. Again, I had the distinct feeling I was being petitioned to spread the word about buying and drinking shade-grown coffee. Although I've not drunk coffee since before Phoebe was born (you don't put caffeine in a shrew, do you?), I was blown away by the velvety-smooth, rich taste of shade-grown coffee in Honduras.

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.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

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.