Cloud Forest Quarantine

The quarantine wouldn’t have been the same without you! Here at MCF’s Milpe Bird Sanctuary we’ve had a fairly full house throughout the quarantine, accompanied for part of the time by three volunteers from Ecuador´s Northern Technical University, Carlos Enriquez, Leonardo Quinteros and Alejandra Erazo.

Together with our staff members, María José Guerrero, Germania Cerezo, Roberto Vera, Andrés Cuascota and dendrology consultant Nicanor Mejía, they’ve stayed healthy, became close friends and have gotten a lot of work done. We send our thanks to the Belgian Program DGD-BOS+ 2017-2021 which has helped sustain some of our work during this period and for funding the new nursery greenhouse that we built just before the pandemic, and that the gang has been busy collecting and germinating tree seeds to get ready to fill it all up!

At about week two of the sanitary emergency, as it’s known in Ecuador, Alejandra was evacuated by her family, but the rest have stayed in for the full experience. This little piece of news is one of the ways we’re thanking them and telling the world that we appreciate all that they’ve done during their time here at MCF. 

As we all know, the pandemic is still an evolving situation, but some of us think that Ecuador got some undue bad press out of the early weeks of the ordeal. In our largest city Guayaquil, the outbreak got out of control and has remained one of many world epicenters for the virus. However, most of the rest of the country has responded more adequately and in the immediate region where we work there are only a handful of cases. 

We’re grateful for the strong government response and have taken advantage of the time to reup and redo many organizational matters and are just itching to get back to work when we safely can.