Honduras: A Country of Transition, in
Transition
by Howard Youth
Sharp-pointed peaks, clad in pines and capped in cloud forest, rise up before me, but soon melt to rolling hills studded with brown farm fields. These foothills, streaked with the smoke of brush fires, fade to a broad, rolling valley choked with a hazy jumble of terra cotta and tin rooftops. I have arrived at Tegucigalpa, the sprawling capital of Honduras.
As the plane lands at the sleepy international airport, I reflect on how fortunate it was that I reserved a window seat. The contrasting landscapes seen through my window--roadless wilderness one moment, urban sprawl the next—reveal the two extremes between which this struggling Central American country hopes to balance. During my ten-day visit, I learn much about Honduras’s uphill struggle to preserve biodiversity against growing odds--and see for myself some of the country’s rich natural treasures. My friend Taylor Ruggles, a foreign service officer currently working at the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa, meets me at the airport. Part of Taylor’s job is to report on environmental issues, so as we travel together, we both pay particular attention to the interactions between people and parks, wildlife and habitats.
Honduras is the second largest and second poorest country in Central America. One of the few positive effects of the country’s relatively slow economic growth has been that many areas remain roadless and rich in natural resources. However, with a sluggish economy and a burgeoning population set to double in 25 years, Honduras must act quickly to save its remaining wild areas. Foreign organizations, local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the government work together, but they operate with limited resources in a land where well-intentioned laws are often ignored. Politically connected businesses often disregard rules, while legions of land-hungry poor burn the forest, build houses, hunt protected wildlife, then move on in a few years after their new farms’s soils fail to yield. Already, an estimated one half of the country’s forests have been cleared.
Despite Honduras’s close proximity to the United States--just over a two-hour flight from Miami--few Americans know much about this country, let alone its wildlife and parks. In the 1980s, the U.S. press covered the country’s role as a staging area for U.S. troops and Nicaraguan Contra rebels and the flood of war-weary Salvadoran and Nicaraguan refugees that poured across its borders. These days, peaceful but poor Honduras garners little international press. Meanwhile, it has been building a huge park system to protect some of the largest remaining wilderness areas in Central America--in the shadow of the media limelight shared by ecotourism power-hitters Belize and Costa Rica.
A Land of Diversity
Biologically speaking, Honduras is a natural melting pot where North meets South, dry meets wet, and high meets low. In this country, the size of Tennessee, eastern bluebirds nest in fields near forests inhabited by keel-billed toucans; northern raccoons share the trees with mantled howler monkeys; and cecropia trees punctuate pine forests. The variety of habitats in the country, and even in individual parks, is stunning. Tropical rainforests blanket lowlands mainly in the east and north. The shorelines along the North Coast and southern Gulf of Fonseca are dotted with mangrove swamps. Pines, nearing their southern limit in the Western Hemisphere, cover inland mountains, many of which are capped with misty cloud forest. In some dry pockets, rare tropical dry forest prevails. These varied habitats support an amazing array of wildlife, including about 205 mammal species, 715 birds, and 1,200 ferns.
Recognizing that the country’s population was quickly growing, and that deforestation was accelerating, the Honduran government established wildlife protection laws and set up a national park system in the early 1980s. Since then, the system has spread to cover 107 areas, including national parks, biological reserves, cultural heritage sites, and the remote Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, which, at 1.3 million acres, is the size of Florida’s Everglades National Park. Many parks’s acreage includes a protected core area surrounded by a buffer zone where certain extractive activities are permitted. According to the Corporacion Hondurena de Desarrollo Forestal (COHDEFOR), the government agency in charge of the parks, 20 percent of the nation’s territory is now designated as protected.
The Sunny Cloud Forest
The park system started initially as a scattered network of 37 cloud forests set aside mainly to protect watershed areas. The 81,000-acre La Tigra National Park--about half of which is core area--was the first. According to AMITIGRA, the organization that staffs the mountainous park, the La Tigra watershed protects 30 percent of Tegucigalpa’s water. But as Taylor and I discover, it protects far more.
Just a winding 45-minute drive from Tegucigalpa, the liquid, flute-like songs of solitaires drift from the shadows beneath a dense canopy of broad-leaved cloud forest trees and some pines. Skinny palms and tree ferns poke out of the understory, and a flock of four bright green emerald toucanets skulk in the foliage, their bright green bodies and banana-yellow bills gleaming in sunlight. The growth of epiphytes at La Tigra impresses us: myriad ferns, bromeliads, mosses, and orchids crowd the towering trunks.
At times, the forest teems with the sounds of birdlife; at others it is quiet and still. Resident common bush tanagers and bright yellow Wilson’s warblers--small songbirds that winter in Mexico and Central America but breed in western and northern North America--are among the most easily seen birds. The park’s ocelots, pumas, and other forest mammals, however, remain in hiding, as does Central America’s most elegant bird, the resplendent quetzal, which resides in the park in small numbers.
The next day, we drive back to La Tigra, this time using the more remote Rosario entrance. Rosario, an abandoned silver mining town, is La Tigra’s headquarters. From this part of the park, we imagine the forest’s demise and rebirth. Huge rusted cogs, an old water storage tank, and the crumbling stone walls of a mill pop out from the undergrowth. Caves and doors in the rocks mark old mine entrances.
Looking at the forest trees, it is easy to create a picture of how the cloud forest had reclaimed the area after it was cut to fuel the mining boom between 1881 and 1954. Dotting the shady hillsides, ancient forest giants rise up, dwarfing comparatively spindly second growth. Metal pipes, like giant veins, poke out of the ground, framed by dozens of fern species. More emerald toucanets call "bah-bah-bah-bah" in the distance, and a covey of a dozen singing quail shuffle in the leaf litter, kicking back leaves in search of seeds and berries.
On the drive back to Tegucigalpa, we pass burning hillsides. The acrid smell of charred vegetation forces us to roll up the windows as we pass through the smoke. Fire proves to be our constant companion throughout our travels. In Honduras, and many other parts of Central America, farmers often live by a "scorched-earth policy," using fire to clear forests, stake claim to land, and to clear weeds and pests from fields. Often, these fires burn out of control, especially during dry spells. During my visit, El Nino is credited with bringing an early dry season. We hear the next day that a fire or two burned out of control into La Tigra. Later in the month, an old park guard tells Taylor that 14 blazes have burned into the park in the past year, scorching about 750 acres.
From Mountain Pines to Coconut Palms
Our next stop is the North Coast and some of its wetland and rainforest parks. During the five-hour drive, we coast over wide, smooth highways substantially improved by the U.S. military during its beefed-up presence in the 1980s. Some of these roads were originally paved by multinational fruit companies. We immediately start to see dramatic changes in habitat and land use. In the western outskirts of Tegucigalpa, the city’s tightly packed houses and crowded streets yield to rugged grassy hills dotted with pines reminiscent of the U.S. West’s ponderosas. In just under an hour, cacti and yucca streaking past, we reach the dry, expansive Comayagua Valley, where a joint Honduran/U.S. Air Force base stands near burned fields and cornfields.
The drive through the valley lasts about 20 miles, after which we again find ourselves in pine-covered hill country. Along the road, people hawk woven hammocks and tortillas, while dozens of tin-roofed huts mark scattered campesino homesteads. The effect of the Caribbean’s moisture is apparent soon after the town of Siguatepeque, where we pass a rolling, verdant valley--a patchwork of green and gold hill farms that remind Taylor of the foothills skirting the Swiss Alps.
Lake Yojoa marks the midpoint of our trip. This huge 20-mile-wide body of water is fed by the runoff of surrounding mountains, and plagued by agricultural runoff and chemicals that leach from a nearby mine. Despite this, the lake is still one of the best birding spots in Honduras. We pull off and seek refreshment at a long string of wooden shacks overlooking the lake. We buy cold sodas from the proprietor of a small restaurant, who rocks her baby in a hammock that hangs from the roof. From the restaurant’s open back wall, we take in the lake’s green reeds and blue water. Fulvous and black-bellied whistling ducks and wintering blue-winged teals and coots flock in the open water, herons of three species wade in the shallows, and snail and white-tailed kites hunt overhead. We identify more than a dozen species before returning our soda bottles and hitting the road.
North of Lake Yojoa, the pines disappear, and dense-canopied rainforest trees line distant ridges. The air has grown hot and humid, and the cultivated plants change too: orange groves and cane fields replace cornfields, and African flame-of-the-forest trees and the first extensive African oil palm plantations appear. We drive past four boys who illegally sell large dead green and spiny-tailed iguanas, and small groups of campesinos, the men wearing cowboy hats, colorful pants, and loose collared shirts, women in cotton dresses. Most have machetes and carry heavy cords of wood they have just hacked from the nearby woods.
After passing by the coastal city of Tela, we see the dramatic spire of 8,000-foot-high Pico Bonito presiding over lowlands dominated by grapefruit orchards, pineapple and palm plantations, and pasture. But the smoke of brush fires, trapped between mountains and coast until the next rains, obscures the otherwise striking view.
Mangroves and Rainforest Rapids
"We are having a lot of trouble protecting wetlands," said Jerry Haylock, a Honduran conservationist and biologist born in La Ceiba. We ride backward on a flaking yellow rail car once used to haul loads of coconuts, chugging into the buffer zone of Cuero y Salado Wildlife Refuge. Haylock is director of REDHES, an NGO that unites five North Coast conservation organizations to improve their effectiveness in funding and activism. One of those groups is FUCSA, a foundation created by Honduran businessman and conservationist Pepe Herrero to support Cuero y Salado, which is named for the two rivers that meet there.
Haylock gestures at the wide, wet, grassy clearing through which the rail car slowly rattles. A huge fallen ceiba tree provides a backdrop. "There was three months of burning to clear this area illegally for cattle," says Haylock. Altogether, 740 acres of flooded rainforest was burned and fenced in 1994, seven years after the area was declared a refuge. Benefiting from a legal system where judges are over-worked and under-paid, the man responsible was briefly jailed, then released. His fences still stand, and his cattle graze the land.
Upon reaching the headquarters, we pile into a large motorboat and set out with a local guide to explore some of the backwaters of the 32,700-acre refuge. We ride across glassy open water and are soon swallowed up in a tangled forest of red and white mangrove. Sunlight glints off the dazzling blue wings of a large morpho butterfly that flits past. A troop of mantled howler monkeys roar in the distance and a striking keel-billed toucan flaps overhead. Our boat drifts close to three green iguanas and a basking, gaping American crocodile. Although we don’t see the refuge’s manatees, we do spot a Neotropical otter (Lontra longicaudis) plying the water.
Back on shore, we meet some of the people who live and work in the park. In Honduras’ refuges, people are allowed to fish with single lines and residents, usually those inhabiting the area before a park was declared, may collect wood for cooking fires and building. Tito, a compact, barrel-chested man wearing a baseball cap, pulls his dugout canoe to shore and starts unloading firewood he gathered in the park, while his sons splash in the water beside him. Tito, who like his sons was born in the park, makes a living buying and selling local fish. His wife and kids run the park’s small concessions. Jesus Pineda, a lithe fisherman from nearby La Ceiba, chats with Tito, leaning against his freshly painted 20-foot-long boat, which had been carved two years ago from a single guataul tree.
After leaving Cuero y Salado, we meet Kent Forte, a former Peace Corps volunteer who is one of the few people ever to climb to the jagged top of Pico Bonito. He has lived in Honduras for seven years and now works as a facilitator for a Honduran/American joint venture that aims to create a 22-room nature lodge and conference center in the buffer zone of Pico Bonito National Park. The lodge will sit on about 100 acres and cater to ecotourists and business groups. Kent and his coworkers are reforesting parts of the property, which had formerly been a farm. They leave other parts to go wild, such as the plot of cacao plants now dedicated to feeding local coatis, kinkajous, squirrels, and fruit-eating birds. Kent takes us to the gushing Cangrejal River, where we dip our bare feet in the cool, clear waters that he hopes will someday carry whitewater kayaks full of lodge guests.
After an hour at the river, Kent drives us in his beat-up white pickup down the rocky road from the lodge site to meet Ricardo "Fito" Steiner, president of the Pico Bonito Foundation, the NGO that helps manage the 370,000-acre Pico Bonito National Park, which, counting both core and buffer areas, encompasses an area about twice the size of Shenandoah National Park. The park’s extensive boundary has not yet been entirely marked, and Steiner needs $23,000 to finish the project. Meanwhile, the foundation can provide only 17 employees to collect visitor fees, guard the park, and work on agroforestry projects in parts of the buffer zone. Steiner says there have been problems with campesinos--as many as six families per week--moving into the park, setting up farms, and illegally cutting wood. His group works closely with COHDEFOR to staff a checkpoint on the only road through the park, where they monitor passing timber trucks and help keep farmers from encroaching.
Reaching the Beach
Our North Coast tour continues the next day in Tela, where we meet with the staff of PROLANSATE, an organization with 23 employees that helps staff and protect five North Coast parks. Thirteen of us climb into a large wooden motor boat and skirt the Caribbean coast toward a distant finger of land called Punta Sal. The peninsula, and 192,700 acres of associated mangrove forest, flooded rainforest, estuarine lagoons, and beaches are protected as Jeannette Kawas National Park, but are under threat even in the 64 percent of the park declared as an untouchable preserve area. Canals drain water for agriculture, land is being illegally cleared, and African oil palm plantations are encroaching. Meanwhile, the government has approved a Canadian developer’s plans to convert a wild buffer zone beach and coconut grove into a large resort.
Along the way, we pass the palm-thatched homes of several garifuna communities. Some 230,000 garifunas live on the Caribbean coast of Belize, Honduras, and Nicaragua, most in Honduras. A mixture of Carib Indian and black, they originated in the Lesser Antilles but moved to their current home almost 200 years ago. Many make a living off the sea in small fishing boats.
Our boat pilot is Alejandro Andino, a garifuna who was born near the park. He and his mother Crisanta Alegria have lived in the park for 10 years now. Andino, who was one of the strongest advocates for the park’s creation, coordinates the park’s guards, and works with local fishermen to establish sustainable regulations with local communities. He also patrols the five-mile park buffer that shrimp trawlers are supposed to avoid. Despite the law, trawlers creep into park waters at night, sweeping up tons of sea creatures, upsetting local Gari[ACCENT OVER "I"]funa fishermen and park officials alike. Villages in the park have formed one of the first Honduran community park councils, which helps protect the park and fight for community rights. As a result, Jeannette Kawas is one of the few national parks where local residents actually report illegal activities, sometimes even implicating their own neighbors. A surprising commitment considering the park, formerly Punta Sal National Park, was renamed after a local conservation leader who was murdered, possibly by disgruntled industrialists or their hired compesinos unhappy with her activism.
Alegria, who runs a small food concession from a thatch hut on the beach, serves fish, plantain, and rice and beans for lunch. The thick, rich smell of frying fish and plantain wafts from her cooking pots as she explains how she has seen more wildlife--turkey-like chachalacas, armadillos, raccoons, and other animals--since the area was designated a national park. We eat our meal beneath the shelter of a stilted thatch loft on which she sleeps. All around, coconut palms wave. The water is an impossibly delicious blue-green.
As we pull away from shore and head back, a pod of a dozen or so bottlenose dolphins follows us for a few minutes before drifting off. Memories of pristine beaches and mangroves fresh in our minds, we draw closer to Tela. But as we disembark, those memories quickly vanish as we realize we are wading in water reeking from the raw sewage that runs from the city into the ocean via the Tela River.
A Last Look Around
Juan Carlos Carrasco, a young, energetic river ecologist, is the park director and only PROLANSATE employee in charge of watching over Punta Izopo, a 28,400-acre North Coast national park embracing beaches, mangrove swamps, and gallery forests. His tireless effort--split between patrolling the park, meeting with local residents, and doing office work back at the Tela headquarters--is but one example of how Honduras’ dedicated conservationists work against great odds to protect their country’s wild areas.
At Punta Izopo, we paddle into the mangroves in sea kayaks, which provide the best access to the narrow trails leading between the trees’ stilted prop roots. Within the mangrove forest, a wintering prothonotary warbler and American redstart flash past. The park’s other denizens include jaguars, manatees, crocodiles, and white-faced and howler monkeys. Beneath the tangled branches, we swat at occasional mosquitoes as Carrasco tells us about the park’s problems--that people in the nearby community dump trash there and illegally hunt iguanas, and that illegal land clearing is a growing concern. Michael Lara, a consultant from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society who is currently working with PROLANSATE, later adds, "All areas on the North Coast--Punta Sal, Punta Izopo, Cuero y Salado--are susceptible to discharge of chemicals upstream. It’s kind of like a slow death." Among the worst polluters are the African palm oil processing plants that dump into rivers upstream. Carrasco wants help with these problems. He hopes to hire three guards and a community relations person soon. But he’ll likely have to wait: With $100,000 in annual funding, provided in pieces by various U.S., Canadian, and Honduran organizations and the Honduran government, PROLANSATE can barely provide for its current employees and programs.
Another place that PROLANSATE works to protect is the 680-acre Lancetilla Botanical Garden, an experimental plantation and biological reserve just outside of Tela, which is the last park we visit. As we watch flotillas of parrots cruise overhead, my guide Victor Gamez tells us about Lancetilla’s flora. Gamez is a 38-year-old indigenous Lenca Indian who has worked at the gardens for 20 years, first as a nursery keeper and grass cutter. Today he conducts plant and bird inventories and leads walks for some of the garden’s 43,000 annual visitors, many of whom are foreign visitors like Taylor and me.
One of the amazing things about Victor is that he did not speak English or know the bird’s names a year ago. "I used to only watch birds with a slingshot," he says with a gleaming smile. As we walk through 45-year-old second growth forest, he listens for the quick "knock-knock" of the pale-billed woodpecker, points out an armadillo burrow, and tells us about symbiotic relationships between wasps and ficus trees. Victor credits his English skills and bird-identifying prowess to an intensive 11-week training course held in Honduras by the R.A.R.E. Center, a Philadelphia-based conservation organization.
Gamez was one of 15 guides from five Honduran NGOs who were trained during the course. A few nights before we met Gamez, we spoke with R.A.R.E.’s Anthony Meyer at the Expatriot’s Bar in La Ceiba. Under a large, palm-thatched roof, and with NBA basketball games flashing on the TV screens behind us, Meyer explained that the program has been a success: "What we’re guaranteeing is that these 15 have jobs and skills. Meanwhile, the five NGOs have done a tremendous job. We’ve done this kind of training in Baja, the Yucatan, and Costa Rica--but nowhere has it been so linked to local conservation programs."
Honduras’s conservation force continues to grow thanks to programs like R.A.R.E.’s. Each small achievement builds on the next. But to ensure a safe future for Honduran wildlife, more Hondurans must support conservation, and the government must strengthen its resolve by enforcing its progressive laws and park boundaries. Meanwhile, the parks play an important part in Honduras’s tourism industry, which is now the country’s third most important source of foreign income after bananas and shrimp, according to the Honduran Tourism Institute.
Many, such as FUCSA founder Pepe Herrero, are optimistic about the future of conservation in Honduras. "We’ve got a lot going on down here. But we have a long way to go," he tells me over drinks at the Expatriot’s Bar. His organization now has 20 full-time employees and helped build the docks and visitor center at Cuero y Salado. "Conservation is millimeter by millimeter," he says as the coastal breeze rattles the palm thatch overhead. "After 11 years, we’re doing a good job of it."
Howard Youth, a former ZooGoer associate editor, is now a freelance writer specializing in wildlife conservation issues.
(ZooGoer 27(3) 1998. Copyright 1998 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.)
