Forest > Articles > Letter From Mexico

Notebook at the ready, I bent over the sleeping form of the tranquilized skunk (or more accurately, a Mexican pygmy skunk) and, gagging at nauseating stench emanating from the scent glands of its anus, I noted the measurements of its teeth, paws, body length and anything else that the biologists - bandanas tied ineffectually over their faces to keep out the stench - called out.

We were at a research station in a hot, humid Mexican forest on the shores of the Pacific. This is one of the world’s most endangered ecosystems - a dry tropical forest. Although most people associate tropical forest with rainforest, dry forests (which have a monsoon-like wet season and a long, parched dry season) originally occupied far larger areas than their better-known counterparts, although no longer. All around the world, tropical dry forests are being cleared for ranching, timber and development. Now Mexico’s largest remaining slice of this fragile ecosystem - which hugs the Pacific coast due west of Mexico City - has been slated by government for a massive tourism development.

While the businessmen and bureaucrats in the capital draw up their spreadsheets, biologists Carlos Gonzalez and Alberto Romero are in the forest trying to save what they can. They hope that by cataloguing the rarer mammals, especially predators, they can demonstrate the forest’s value as a repository of rare and endangered animals and push for its conservation. What animals there are! The pygmy skunk which I had seen earlier (a species found only in the Mexican dry forest) is the least spectacular. The predator list is impressive: spotted cats such as ocelots, jaguars and margays; other cats such as cougars, jaguarundis, bobcats (lynx), as well as coyotes and grey foxes. Ten paying volunteers from Britain, the USA, Australia and Europe, have come via the study-tourism group Earthwatch, to participate in Gonzalez and Romero’s research. We all dearly want to see big cats.

Our research area - the 13,000ha Chamela-Cuixala Biosphere Reserve - is Mexico’s only protected piece of dry forest. Divided into two main areas, part of the reserve belongs to UNAM - Mexico’s largest university, while the adjoining territory is protected, surprisingly, by a London-based organization. “Ever hear of a man called Goldsmith?” asks Gonzalez - a tall, typically handsome Latin man. Like me, most readers probably recall the demise, last year of Oliver Goldsmith, the City tycoon who - back in the 1980s - purchased a huge chunk of wild Mexican coastline to use as a private hideaway. Since the entrepreneur’s death the estate’s management has passed into the hands of the Goldsmith Foundation, which is committed - for the moment anyway - to its conservation.

Gonzalez and Romero know that it will take more than reserves to ensure the future of this forest and the creatures that inhabit it. Unless local people can benefit economically from conserving the forest, the tree will continue to fall. At the moment there is neither an eco-tourism industry nor any real environmental education programme to ensure this, Says Gonzalez. “Unlike, for example Costa Rica, eco-tourism in Mexico hardly exists; the national parks have no infrastructure - no hiking trails, no camp-sites, no interpretative centres, no outreach to the local community.”

We Earthwatch volunteers are, so far, the only ones to have access to this Eden. Morning and evening, we help set traps for the live capture of the forest’s predators, so that the biologists can radio-collar them. We mark out ‘scent stations’, small cleared areas centred round a tiny white pill, that emits a rotting bilious smell which attracts creatures, who then leave their footprints for us to record. We lug heavy gear to the trap sites. We clean equipment; check to see if the camera traps have caught anything in their infra-red beams. We are, basically, eco-tourism pioneers: both Romero and Gonzalez would like to see the industry take off, perhaps hand-in-hand with the beach development, with locals making money from guiding and outfitting groups that want to explore the forest.

That’s just the first step. The problem of local conservation awareness, they concede, may be much harder to overcome. I am following Dr Alberto Romero’s small muscular figure up a steep hillside, on our way to check an ocelot trap. According to him, local feeling about the reserve is, at best, mixed, especially that section protected by the Goldsmith Foundation.

“There are many rumours,” admits the biologist, as we sweat up the hill, trying to balance the unwieldy steel cage of the trap, and the bag containing the hapless chicken that will be used as bait.

“The people say that when Goldsmith came here to buy land, not everyone wanted to sell. The stories go that police and army were bribed to plant drugs, or make life difficult for those people who didn’t want it. Meanwhile,” says Gonzalez, “local understanding of the value of the reserves is lamentably poor. We spoke to some communities last year, asked them if they knew what the reserves were for, and they answered, ‘They’re zoos aren’t they?’”

Our ocelot trap fails to catch anything. In fact, this week, no cats have been tempted by the chickens in the traps. The biologists are growing a little anxious - this is unusual. They had hoped to catch some already collared animals whose collar batteries had gone dead and needed replacing. This is their last week of research before the rains come, and make the trails impassable and shuts down the research for another six months.

Meanwhile, the volunteers, most of whom have come hoping to see cats, are trying not to show their disappointment. The following morning, Gonzalez and Romero take us to walk a dry river-bed in what they call a ‘buffer zone’, a non-protected area of forest and mango plantation beyond the northern edge of the reserve. Fanned in a long line across the gravel and sand, we have our eyes fixed on the ground, searching for scat [faeces], to be collected and put into plastic bags for analysis back at the research station. Despite the baking heat being reflected from the river-bed, it is fascinating work. Each dry, brown pile reveals something about the mechanics behind bio-diversity. In faeces left by grey fox, puma, ocelot, coyote and raccoon, we find undigested wild fruit - eaten to satisfy thirst, - and seeds. During the dry season, many of the carnivores eat fruits in order to satisfy their thirst. One pile of coyote scat is purely of bright orange wild papaya fruit, dotted with shiny black seeds. The predators, by depositing these seeds all over the forest, ensure the even distribution of each fruiting tree species.

The scat also tells us about habitat destruction. Says Gonzalez, “Coyotes thrive on open habitat. Their increasing presence here indicates that more areas are being opened up, more trees being felled. We’ve also found a lot of puma scat - these cats can adapt well to habitat fragmentation and human disturbance, but up until about 18 months ago we would have expected to find jaguar tracks here and many more signs of ocelot. Both these cats hate human disturbance and need dense forest in order to thrive. Now we’re not finding jaguar tracks or scat in this part of the forest at all, and today, just one ocelot.’

We find a dead lyre snake - a species only recently discovered (ours was the fifth known specimen to be recorded), run over by vehicles that had been passing up and down the dry river-bed. Like the pygmy skunk, lyre snakes are thought to be found only in Mexico’s dry tropical forest. A mile or so further on we come upon the vehicles that killed the rare snake. A bulldozer with a great shovel attached to its front is digging up industrial-sized loads of gravel and dumping them into the back of a waiting lorry. The drivers nod and smile to us - a strange bunch of gringos - as we pass. The biologists tell us to be sure to smile back. Indeed, they stop and shoot the breeze with the men in the big vehicles, despite the fact that they are extracting gravel illegally and ripping up the riverbed in the process.

“You can’t throw anger at individuals,” Gonzalez explains later when we stop at some pools of water left over from last years’ rains, in which tiny fish flicker and dart.

“This is a poor country. People need to make a living. If you’re living in a shack by the road and need a job, you need a job.”

The biologists, keen not to be bad ambassadors for conservation, try to be courteous to everyone - even the poachers and marijuana planters that they occasionally run into, and who use the reserve to make black money. “We try to appeal to them, but we don’t yell at them or report them - it wouldn’t do any good.” Instead, they hope that gradually eco-tourism and even, ideally, a certain amount of controlled hunting, will change attitudes by allowing people to earn from the forest.

This approach has been successful in other parts of the developing world - most notably in Zimbabwe, whose CAMPFIRE scheme allows local chiefs to lease hunting and eco-safari concessions to safari operators in tribally-held land. Though there have been abuses, by and large most conservationists agree that CAMPFIRE has safeguarded big game in areas where wild habitat would otherwise have been destroyed for farming and livestock-rearing. Gonzalez acknowledges that Mexico is a long way off having the kind of regulated society that could make such a system work. The key, he thinks, lies in education, which is difficult when no one may enter the forest without special permits. An interpretative trail has recently been set up, with trees labelled according to species, and some school groups have been brought in.

Gonzalez and Romero believe that something far more ambitious is needed. Future plans for their project include training Mexican teachers and community leaders to conduct seminars on conservation and ecology at both local adults and schools. This will mean bringing people into the forest more regularly, whereas at the moment only those with special permits may enter. To get any kind of effective educational programme going - let alone eco-tourism or controlled hunting - would involve a long bureaucratic struggle.

As for the Earthwatch Volunteers, by the end of our week in the forest, we have still not captured any cats. The morning and evening checks on the live traps have yielded several possums, pygmy skunks, an iguana and some coati mundis - strange, agile scavengers that look like a cross between a raccoon and an anteater. There have been frequent encounters with other wildlife - shy white-tail deer, snakes, a large, beaded lizard (one of only two species of venomous lizard in the world), which Alberto captured by hand for the group to examine.

Although we have been lured here by our desire to see an exotic cat, little by little the forest’s greater magic has worked on us. The vegetation alone is fascinating. There are literally hundreds of species of hardwood tree, many with aloe-like bromeliads, plants that draw their nourishment from the air, growing from niches in their trunks and branches. There are papillo trees, strange things that look as though they have been wrapped in brown, red or green paper. Amazing pink and yellow blossoms stand out against the bare woodland, the blooms heralding the end of the dry, leafless season, and the coming of the rains, when the forest becomes a lush, leafy jungle. Every other afternoon Gonzalez and Romero drive us down to one of the all-but deserted beaches to swim. Pelicans and albatross-sized frigate birds cruise overhead. Dolphins play at the mouth of the bay, ready to attack any itinerant shark unwise enough to try and enter.

This is certainly paradise, and those who wish to protect it deserve success - whether they be the Goldsmith Foundation, UNAM or the eco-tourism and hunting operators that the biologists would so like to see in the future. Meanwhile government, developers and locals are hoping to see the area yield jobs, money and profits. One can only pray that, against the odds, the vision of the people like Gonzalez and Romero - which incorporates everyone’s needs - will come to fruition. As Romero admits on our last night, sipping tequila and listening to the insects singing in the forest below, “We are few, very few...” We fall silent, letting the night chorus wash in. Somewhere down in that darkness, stealthy cats are hunting.

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