Message from our President:

Nearly six months ago, on April 4^th, during our first ordinary assembly meeting of this year, we elected MCF’s new Board of Directors for the period April 2020 – April 2022. This was soon after the COVID-19 pandemic began, and Ecuador declared a national sanitary emergency. It was our first ever on-line assembly, and it was a joyful meeting, full of enthusiasm and optimism despite growing concerns about the unfolding situation. Half a year later, we are now living with a new normal and adapting to the severe economic toll that the pandemic has inflicted, not only locally but globally. For a relatively small conservation organization, whose core funding came mostly from birdwatcher entrance fees, the collapse of tourism obliges us to seek out creative and audacious new ideas. 

Fortunately, as the pandemic arrived, we were completing our ‘Strategic Plan 2020-2027’, which is now guiding our work in a more coherent and focused manner. With very ambitious goals, particularly making sure that no local extinctions are suffered in the bird fauna of Northwestern Ecuador and that habitat restoration will allow for the regional movement of fauna among protected areas (public and private, like ours), we are launching renewed efforts to improve our conservation actions as well as new strategies to strengthen our contributions to the well-being of local communities.

In line with the optimism that keeps us moving at Mindo Cloudforest Foundation, our reserves´ staff have demonstrated resilience and commitment throughout these complex times. Certainly, living isolated in the reserves has helped to assure some protection against COVID-19. Nonetheless, uncertainties played a role in their sense of personal security while services, food and supplies were difficult to obtain. To our on-the-ground team, our gratitude! Please read the brief note at the end of this newsletter prepared by María José and Roberto two of our staff members.

While tourism has collapsed, we know it´s a temporary phenomenon (possibly impacting us for a couple of years), and we know that an enriched and more respectful relationship with nature will emerge out of the current situation. We continue betting on nature and bird tourism as conservation strategies that will help ensure the viability of our reserves and public protected areas, while also contributing to the local economy.  As the movement of people and the transportation industry are now reinitiating, we are undertaking work to increase the experience of visitors and safeguard our biodiversity. Paul Greenfield, founding member of MCF and internationally renowned bird artist and birding guide, shares with us his reflections on post COVID-19 tourism. 

On another topic, we´d like to send a special thanks to various kind donors, who as I write, have made possible the acquisition of two additional properties for the protection of birds and other important biodiversity in our Tandayapa-Milpe-Silanche River gradient. We expect to finish the transaction this month of September 2020. We have other sites in mind to continue adding to our conservation efforts and we´ll be sure to tell you about them as more specifics arise. 

Logically enough, even without the visiting birders, the birds keep coming. This past week for example, in Milpe, I was able to spot a male Blackburnian Warbler in strikingly colorful plumage, my first neotropical migrant to arrive this season (though perhaps a little early). — Here´s one painted by Paul Greenfield who you´ll hear more from in the following segment of this newsletter. 

Thank you for reading through to the end, because our work has more meaning and becomes more sustainable when we share it with friends and the international society, the constituency who cares for birds, nature and our local community. To that end, we´re implementing a new communications strategy, and I invite you to visit our revamped web site https://legacy.mindocloudforest.dev/. 

As new Board President, I’m honored to send you our Fall 2020 bulletin and to introduce the recently elected board members for the period 2020-2022.
 
Gratefully, 
 
Hugo Arnal-Delgado

Welcome to everyone and thank you for your time and interest, thanks also to Momentum Novum for organizing this event and to Karo Chamorro for the invitation.

So, I´ve been asked to talk about my experience in helping create and co-found a non-profit conservation organization in Ecuador, Mindo Cloudforest Foundation back in 2001 with some of our activities starting in 2000, two decades ago.

“Hustling to Conserve Bird Habitat in the Tropical Andes.” (Recommended that you find Van McCoy´s song The Hustle from the 70s and listen to it while you read this to get the whole experience)

I—Quick history of MCF  

In 2000 the construction of Ecuador´s Heavy Crude Pipeline (OCP) across the top of the pristine Mindo watershed and through wonderful cloud forests that several of our members had bought for conservation and ecotourism projects brought together a group of birders, bird guides and eco-tourism business-people: we were at the time 6 people from 5 countries the US, Ecuador, Australia, Holland and Belgium. Now we´re a group of 16 people from 6 countries, biologists, ornithologists, forestry specialists, conservationists, artists and green entrepreneurs. 

We started with a handful of ideas, an area we wanted to work in and a website we built ourselves in Netscape Navigator. Maybe we had $50 in the bank, and everyone in the foundation had jobs or business to attend to, such that there was no one working full time. Now we pay monthly salaries that give stability to 10 families (including mine) working at our network of private conservation areas at three altitudinal levels on the Western slope of the Andes in NW Ecuador.

• Our Río Silanche Bird Sanctuary at 350-400 meters elevation in the lowland tropics
• Our Milpe Bird Sanctuary at 1100 meters elevation in the Andean Foothills
• The cluster of forest blocks that make up our Tandayapa and Oreothraupis reserves and the Puyucunapi pilot project between 1800-2500 meters elevation.

You can map the meaning of the word “hustle” across our 2 decades almost in tandem with the greater and direr realization of the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crises. At the beginning those threats were on our collective radar but somehow off in the future while we were constantly hustling to meet the monthly bills and keep our bird sanctuaries open to the public. This version of the hustle continued through what was branded as a “Citizen´s Revolution” in Ecuador that brought a much more challenging regulatory and tax environment.

Constant revolutionary changes during a period of 10 years certainly kept us on our toes and gave me a whole bunch of new gray hair. They also raised wages considerably and made tangible improvements in the living standards of our staff, it was sort of the $15 minimum wage before that became a slogan in the USA. – Sure, that was a massive challenge for us to be able to finance, but we got past it.

Now that we´ve moved out of that period of the revolution, in the last few years we have somehow come to, snapped to attention and awakened to the brutal speed of the changing climate and need to hustle to try to make a bigger conservation contribution faster. This change has come over us just as the enormous arrival of international consumer goods making the Ecuadorian middle-class part of the abundance experienced in many places and cultures around the world.

This period of “modernization” perhaps, has also seen our organization grow from a very simple friends club to a complex structure, and we like to think that our conservation impacts have grown from notional or perhaps aspirational to ever more relevant, and since it´s the logic of the battle we´ve joined, we´re looking to turn up the volume, increase those impacts, speed up our hustle as it were.

It´s been an interesting journey on the personal side. When I first arrived in Ecuador I hadn´t planned to stay for 25 years and raise a family, become a citizen, nor had I planned to help start a conservation organization that´s become my life´s work. It happens fast when your always hustling around.   

Text by: Ilán Greenfield

Does it have to come from above? Does it have to come from below? Does it have to come from the higher ups, from the large-scale dispositions of the people in power? Or of the daily actions of each citizen? How do we save the planet? How do we reverse the consequences of climate change?

It is clear, now, that to positively impact the environment, we must act together. And we, the citizens, are a key piece for this. We can, in real terms, contribute to change through what we do.

Mindo Cloudforest Foundation (MCF), in its tireless fight to conserve nature, has created an innovative initiative to modify the paradigms of the past: a digital application that measures your efforts in favor of the environment. And with every effort you make, an opportunity to take advantage of the pure air and special experiences that nature can offer you.

The so-called ‘Chocó biosphere’ is one of these magical points of our nature – an axis of the lung planetary. And in the last two hundred years, it has suffered the indiscriminate destruction of its habitat. These lush forests are so powerful that they produce their own clouds; its own rain; they offer an indispensable balance for nature; they buffer erosion and droughts for the benefit of people across the country. Its variety of species of ora and fauna is among the most biodiverse on the planet. Its endless vivid landscapes have fascinated visitors from all over the world. And they become increasingly popular as a new destination to go to.

That makes you curious to know this fabulous destination, that you want to venture to this universe of cloud forests and experience the well-being that its nature offers in its purest form, that is also an important contribution. In the words of Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum, “you will only take care of what you love and you will only love what you know.”