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Saving the harpy eagle
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photo by Ron Magill, courtesy of the Patronato Amigos del Aguila Harpia

Saving the harpy eagle
by Eric Jackson

"Why do we worry about just one animal?" Dr. Eduardo Álvarez asked the audience at the Tupper Auditorium.

The biologist was in town for an event put on by the Patronato Amigos del Aguila Harpia, an eight-year-old foundation dedicated to preserving the harpy eagle, Panama's national bird. In fact, the group bears much of the responsibility for species' 2002 designation by the legislature as such.

"It's because it represents the tropical forest," Álvarez answered his own rhetorical question. Those who would save whole ecosystems would do well to have emblematic species, he explained. "They never put a mosquito on the cover of National Geographic."

As he developed in his presentation, harpy eagles do survive in fragmented habitats, but they're still threatened. "If we don't take care, they'll disappear from the map."

And how would people take care? For one thing, by having some respect and understanding for those who live and work in the forests where these birds live.

Harpy eagles have been found from as far north as Mexico and as far south as Argentina, but their stronghold ranges from Panama to the Amazon Basin.

These are places where their forest habitat is under constant attack, but Álvarez doesn't think that it makes a whole lot of sense to direct a frontal assault on everyone who cuts trees there. Better, he believes, to convince loggers that it's in their interest and that of their families and communities to back off and preserve any eagle nest they encounter, with a little fringe around it. That way, birdwatching tourists are likely to come in on the logging roads, and these people pay a lot of money to do so, creating jobs and income in hardscrabble Third World rural communities. Among the slides he showed the crowd was one of ecotourists in a logging camp.

The biologist's understanding of economic necessities has its limits, however. He denounced clear-cut logging and replacement of the destroyed forests with teak as an activity that "enriches a few" but doesn't replace habitat for wildlife. He especially condemned gold mining, which over much of Latin America is done by using high-pressure hoses to wash veins of the metal out of forested areas. Not only is the land denuded, not only does silt kill things along the rivers into which it washes, but then toxic chemicals are used to get the gold out of the ore, and those are particularly destructive. Mercury in particular, he said, "destroys everything."

Álvarez came here with a mission. He's been studying harpy eagles in Venezuela, Guyana, Panama and elsewhere, and considers it a problem that researchers in different countries don't tend to share information and cooperate. The birds don't recognize international boundaries, he pointed out, and thus he advocates a continental approach to their conservation. That's why he's one of the founders of Earthmatters, an international network for such cooperation.

In his years working in the field, Álvarez was one of the pioneers in fitting harpy eagles with radio transmitters that allow them to be tracked. From that work it has been discovered that the individual birds don't tend to stray far from their nests, and that they tend to regularly space their nests. Here in Panama, the national birds' nests will typically be spaced three to six kilometers apart if they and their habitat are left alone. We have about 35 known harpy eagle nests in this country, but there are most likely a number of others that are not recorded by biologists.

Harpy eagle nests are used year after year, with some having more than 30 years of continuous occupation on record. The birds have a three-year nesting cycle, with chicks dependent on their parents for food for 20 to 22 months and reaching reproductive maturity in about four and one-half years. A harpy can live 40 or more years, and it's not yet known whether pairs are monogamous for more than a nesting cycle.

In the question and answer period after Álvarez's main presentation, there was a lively debate about the usefulness of one sort of conservation tactic, the reintroduction of harpies into places from which they have been driven. Some members of groups like the Peregrine Fund, which are committed to reintroduction, pointed to successes in Belize and elsewhere, but Álvarez pointed out that the great majority of reintroduction attempts have failed. He thinks that too little is known to do this well. As an example he noted that harpies, unlike other eagle species, don't hunt from long distances using keen eyesight, but tend to use their sense of hearing a lot more, and that the sounds of a habitat in which one is raised are likely to be different from those of a place where it may be introduced.

What are the harpy eagle's natural enemies? Parasitic worms, vampire bats and human beings are the known ones, but there is still much to learn about the natural threats that our national bird faces.

The Patronato Amigos del Aguila Harpia got its start with the project to create the harpy eagle exhibit at the Summit Zoo, which is the only one in the world. That, in one small way, is a means to generate both economic activity and consciousness about the threatened birds. In other countries, Álvarez pointed out, these needs are addressed in different ways. In the Peruvian Amazon, birdwatching lodges are proliferating and drawing tourists who will pay $4,000 to come and see harpy eagles. "In Ecuador almost all biologists are guides --- they make more money as guides than as biologists," he noted.

After all, he concluded, "people have to eat," and any conservation strategy that stands a chance of succeeding must take that into account.

Also in this section:
Saving the harpy eagle
This issue's orchid