Guanahacabibes: Cuba’s Little Visited All-Inclusive National Park

Our group of marine biologists transferred from boat to van in the coastal town of La Coloma for the short ride to Pinar del Rio, the largest city in the province with the same name. The “stuck in time” feeling one gets traveling through Cuba was especially strong here, as we passed actual milkmen delivering their dairy canisters in horse-drawn wagons. Entering the city, the skyline was dominated by a large, stark, gray apartment building that seemed transplanted from Moscow.

We were headed to Guanahacabibes National Park, which covers the far western end of the island, for a workshop on Cuba’s sea turtles, invited by our partners at Cuba Marine Research and Conservation. As we waited for our colleagues coming from Havana to meet us, we passed the time with Cuban beers and music in a hotel bar. Once on the bus, we passed through charming towns with every house fronted by columns as well as empty fields waiting for the next tobacco crop to be planted.

Eventually the fields gave way to forests as we entered the park. Large iguanas lined the road as we wound down to the coast. We stopped for pictures at a lighthouse that marks the westernmost point of the island, just 100 miles or so from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. The island and the peninsula are intimately linked, by migratory ocean animals like sea turtles, as well as topography, with its limestone rock foundation. The exposed limestone is so rugged that Cubans call it “diente de perro” or dog’s teeth.   

The park is home to one of Cuba’s most important green turtle nesting beaches. This season was the most successful period for nests that our partners with the Center for Marine Research at the University of Havana have ever had, with nearly 900 nests, nearly double their previous high. Our Billion Baby Turtles project recently supported this work, providing enough funding to save roughly 14,000 hatchlings, putting us over 100,000 hatchlings saved for the year. This visit was our first opportunity to see the hatchlings that we have helped to save and our partners didn’t disappoint.

Green turtle hatchling from Guanahacabibes

Spreading out among dozens of nests that were nearing maturation, our partners found one ready to go. Dozens of green turtle hatchlings made their way over the sand to the clear blue waters while our group watched in awe. This beach is the most important nesting beach on Cuba’s main island and second most important overall though funding has been hard to come by to adequately monitor the several beaches in the park where turtles nest.

The next day was an intensive course on the sea turtles of Cuba. Researchers from local projects spoke of the history of Cuba turtle conservation (complete with a photo of Fidel and a turtle). International turtle experts (including yours truly) presented on how the country can develop tourism that benefits conservation efforts and local communities while avoiding the negative impacts that the industry has had in many places especially in the Caribbean.

That evening, at the Villa Maria la Gorda, the group bonded over Cuba’s favorite pastimes, music and rum, at the oceanside bar. The hotel’s odd name (translation: Fat Mary’s) comes from Guanahacabibes’ legendary patron who supposedly watched over pirates that formerly inhabited the area. The latest of a string of extraordinary sunsets over the water provided the backdrop to the music and conversation.

Guanahacabibes is known as a world-class diving site but generally is left off the itineraries of people coming to visit this Caribbean island. The water drops off quickly from shore, to over a thousand meters providing a number of dramatic options for experienced divers. The terrestrial part of the park also has its attractions. One day a few of us took a guided tour to the Pearl Cave, an impressive collection of underground halls and rooms carved out by rain.

Part of the reason for my visit was to explore the possibility of working with Cuba Marine Research and Conservation to promote sea turtle-based tourism to this park that benefits conservation efforts. The incredible beaches, spectacular reefs, and extraordinary sunsets make this park an ideal location and we hope to be offering trips as soon as 2014.

On our last day at the park, I hopped into the water with Fernando from CMRC, for a quick snorkel around the resort’s dock. An incredible amount of fish was sheltering in the dock’s shade as we swam through the crystal clear waters. Hopefully it won’t be long before we can share this Cuban jewel with conservation travelers!

Stars Over the Amazon: Earthwatch’s Amazon Riverboat Expedition

By SEEtheWILD traveler Judy Bradshaw

In August 2013 I flew to Iquitos, Peru to meet a group of volunteers participating in a project to study biodiversity in the Amazon Rainforest in northern Peru for fifteen days. The project was headed by Dr. Richard Bodmer, a conservation biologist, who worked at the University of Kent in England. Dr. Bodmer has been doing studies in the Amazon since 1984 with a slew of Peruvian biologists and others who were interested in rainforest ecology, especially related to climate change.

We were there to act as inexpert hands while we lived on a boat and chose various activities supervised by the biologists. We lived for the week on the Ayapua, a refurbished boat built in 1906 during the rubber boom which had been used to transport rubber out of the area.  It fell into disuse as other materials and other countries became more profitable to use in the rubber trade. 

We were very fortunate to be on this last voyage of the Ayapua which was to be converted into a maritime museum to be docked in Iquitos. Our group was small, only seven of us, so we each had our own room. There were three single American women (from Denver, Houston, Portland), a Scottish couple, and a woman and man from Australia who did not come together.           

After meeting in Iquitos and staying at the Casa Morey Hotel, our group of 7 from around the world took a bus about two hours upstream where we boarded the Ayapua and then cruised another day and a half upstream on the Marañon  River, a tributary of the Amazon.  We eventually anchored at the mouth of the Samiria River where it flowed into the Marañon. This is an area very rich in wildlife and especially plentiful in fish that attracted much of the wildlife. There were several Cocama Indian villages in the area. We anchored there for about a week and then traveled a short distance upstream and anchored for another week.

Our living quarters were comfortable, the food was good (wonderful fish), and the staff was competent and kind. There was even a nurse on board who tended to a few of us with our colds and various other ailments. We had air conditioning in our rooms and in the dining room. The generator was turned off at 11 pm and back on at 6 am.  The jungle was hot, humid, buggy, and we covered up and wore headnets if we were doing any of the land transects. We used very strong insect repellant which seemed to help. Maybe.

Our daily activities looked like this:

• 5:30/6:30 am – 9 am:  Macaws or water birds which involved counting birds using a GPS unit while traveling in a motorized canoe.
• 7 am-noon:  Terrestrial transect in which we took a boat to an area and slowly walked in 1.5 km (about a mile) and then back out, while observing and counting terrestrial animals (mainly monkeys, some birds).
• 9:30 am – noon:  Fish survey which involved going setting up a 50m net for one hour and using rods to fish. The fish were gathered, placed in buckets of water, identified, weighed and measured, and then released. 
• 2-4 pm:  Frog transect which involved walking on land and turning over leaf litter with sticks and watching tiny frogs hop up. These were identified, weighed and measured and then released by the frog biologists.
• 3-5 pm:  Dolphin survey in a motorized boat, counting the gray and pink river dolphins. The gray dolphins liked to leap in the air; the pink dolphins didn’t.
• 4-6 pm:  Macaw and water bird survey, depending on the one that we didn’t do in the morning.

In the evenings, we had a Happy Hour, dinner, and then met to discuss the day’s results. There was also an option to participate in night projects which involved going out in a boat and counting caiman or water frogs using a giant spotlight to see them. 

So…what did we volunteers do? We did what they told us to do.  We recorded, counted, observed, and entered the data in the computer in the library when we returned to the Ayapua. We talked to each other and the biologists and looked at the incredible surroundings and wildlife and fell into bed exhausted every night.  Mostly we worked.  At the end of the trip, Richard complimented us on being such a hard-working group.

Highlights of the trip:

The neotropical cormorants were migrating through from July though September.  No one knows where they come from or where they go.  One morning, on a 12 km. boat ride, we counted twenty-two thousand of them roosting in trees.  Yep.

The gray river dolphins hunt in pods and drive the schools of fish into the shore and then move in a feeding frenzy. The fish explode into the air…silver in the sun with the dolphins below churning the water, leaping and gulping. We also saw a pair of giant river otters and their two babies…the first that have been seen in the area in years. The ban on hunting them is working. Richard was ecstatic.

   

We participated in the anniversary celebration of the founding of Bolivar village fifty-one years before. Twenty-six families lived there.  We watched soccer games and drank a fermented manioc drink from shells and had simple conversations with the Cocama Indians who were kind to us and didn’t treat us like anything special, a relief after the many other tours I have taken We later returned to the village and gave the children school supplies we had brought for them.  It was wonderful sitting with them, being just one of the troop in the Amazon rainforest.

Doing the early morning bird counts, in the quiet dawn.  There is nothing like Dawn on the Amazon with the mist rising over the water, the pink sky and the howler monkeys howling.  In the afternoon there is nothing like Afternoon on the Amazon with the heat and bugs.  In the evening there is nothing like Dusk on the Amazon as the heat breaks and the sun disappears.  In the night when standing on the deck looking up, there is nothing like the stars over the Amazon.  Nothing.

Living Out Dreams on Cuba's Isle of Youth

When I was offered the opportunity last March to go to Cuba to participate in a workshop on sea turtle conservation tourism, I agreed before the question was fully asked by my colleague Fernando. The mysterious island just a (very) long swim from Florida has long occupied a top spot on the bucket list. This past October, that opportunity came to fruition as I received my visa and boarded my flight to Havana.

Booksellers in Old Havana

Most of what I had heard about Cuba was about “la Revolucion” and “el Comandante” Fidel Castro and how the island stands out in the hemisphere for resisting the temptations of capitalism and democracy to forge its own socialist path. I had heard very little about the country’s natural beauty and wildlife. In the world of sea turtle conservation, Cuba was  well-known for attempting to maintain the trade in hawksbill turtle shells, long since closed by the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species, to sell off a stockpile of pieces to Japan that had been confiscated by the government.

My first experience with how things work in Cuba actually came while still in the US. I walked up to the check-in desk early one morning for my charter flight from Miami to Havana a bit dazed from a sleepless red-eye from Los Angeles. Unlike the normal airport experience where one attendant does all of the checking in, I was herded to four different people before finally heading to the gate. One to check my ticket, one to weigh my bag, one to take the baggage charge, and I’m still trying to figure out what the fourth person did.

From there, it was smooth sailing. The charter flight was half full and possibly the shortest flight I’ve ever taken, clocking in at about 35 minutes in the air. Once in Havana, we made our way to our hotel, the charming hotel Santa Isabel, located on the beautiful Plaza de las Armas in Old Havana. There we met up with our group of marine biologists and conservationists, organized by our host Fernando Bretos. Fernando is an American marine biologist who is leading efforts to study the biological connections between Cuba, the US, and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. His project, Cuba Marine Research and Conservation, has shown that Cuba’s turtles can end up in both the Florida Keys and off the coast of Mexico.

From the rooftop view of this historic hotel, you can see a variety of old forts and historic buildings and the lively plaza full of small booksellers and vendors of communist propaganda. Leading off from the plaza is Calle Obispo, a pedestrian street that epitomizes Havana, with sections of perfect cobblestone and restored buildings interspersed with dilapidated facades and piles of rubble. Dinner was served family style at a wonderful restaurant, accompanied like just about everything else in this country with music.

Before sunrise the next morning, we were off to the island’s domestic airport for a short flight to Isla de Juventud, a large island to the south that is part of the country. For the second straight day I greeted the sunrise getting off an airplane, this time boarding a taxi for the 40 minute ride through pine forest and open savannah. A quick nap in the 1950’s-era resort El Colony was enough to revive our energy before hopping onto our dive boat to explore the coral reefs that circle the island.

Though I’ve worked with sea turtles for 15 years, this was my first diving experience. Most of my experience has been on the beach, waiting for the turtles to come ashore, outside of snorkeling for fun. This time I was able to immerse myself in the water, exploring the incredible coral reefs much more fully. Starting shallow and slowly working to deeper areas over several dives, I saw walls of schoolmaster snappers, plenty of triggerfish (fish), moray eels, a stingray, and plenty of lionfish.

Lionfish caught for lunch

Despite their incredible natural beauty, lionfish are not supposed to be here. Unfortunately they are becoming much more common throughout the Caribbean, far from their native Indo-Pacific reefs. One good thing is that these fish are delicious once the venomous spines are cut off. We caught a couple to go along with our delicious sustainably-caught lobster for lunch.  Lobster are quite abundant on the seagrasses and reefs of the Isle of Youth. In fact almost all of Cuba’s lobster fishery is based here.

Day two on the island, on our third dive, I finally felt that feeling that makes diving one of the most addictive of adventure sports. The dive master and I settled under the boat, about 30 feet down, in the middle of a half circle of coral with a large rock formation in the center. The lobster carcasses attracted an extraordinary collection of fish and standing on the sandy bottom, I felt removed from the human world for the first time in my life.

Back on board the boat, after digesting a lunch of lobster, lionfish, beans, and rice, we hopped back into the water with our snorkels to explore a small cave. The coast along this stretch of the Isle of Youth is craggy limestone rock and in one spot, you can swim through a cave about 10 feet to a small beach encircled in the rock. A short walk over the rocks to a tiny perfect beach led us back to the water. The only downside to this perfect day was finding pieces of a hawksbill turtle shell, discarded among the rocks, a sign that work remains to be done to save Cuban turtles. Fernando’s project has, among other initiatives, brought a group of Mexican fishermen here to compare notes on developing alternatives to fishing for turtles, based on the model of our Mexican partner, The Grupo Tortuguero.

Sunset at the Isle of Youth

We again rose before the sun the next day, this time for a boat ride back to the main island. Our group watched the spectacular sunrise over the Caribbean, occasionally passing mangrove islands at the remote Cayos los Indios and Cayos de San Felipe as we crossed the Gulf of Batabano to the town of La Coloma. This town, a major hub of Cuba’s fishing industry, will be key to protecting the incredible reefs that we just dived. Conservation travel can also be a major factor and SEE Turtles will be partnering with fellow Ocean Foundation project Cuba Marine Research and Conservation to offer volunteer trips to monitor these reefs, hopefully with a serving of lionfish for lunch.

5 Small Ship Wildlife Cruises

Ocean lovers looking for a unique adventure should read on. SEEtheWILD offers an exciting alternative to the typical luxury cruise, where wildlife is the focus, rather than massages and mai tais. On these small but luxurious ships, including a classic schooner, you will explore marine wildlife hot spots in style.

Travelers on these voyages will enjoy opportunities to snorkel, kayak, cruise on Zodiacs, or even disembark for a bit and camp and hike. With destinations spanning the globe, you can choose the warm waters of the Bahamas, or the stunning glaciated shoreline of Alaska; either way, adventure awaits and the ocean is calling!

The following five trips are the most popular small ship wildlife cruises offered on SEEtheWILD.org; you can also browse the full listing of cruises on our website.

• Galapagos Adventure: The quintessential wildlife tourism destination, the Galapagos Islands are home to a slew of unique species, including giant tortoises, iguanas, Galapagos penguins, whales, dolphins, and many unusual species of birds. Explore this fascinating area by private yacht, with opportunities to disembark at a giant tortoise research station, to hike, and to even camp overnight among tortoises. Offered by Natural Habitat Adventures, this 11-day trip starts at $5,695 per person.

• Great Bear Rainforest: Delve into the rugged coastal rainforest of British Columbia on this sailing expedition with Maple Leaf Adventures. Aboard the schooner Maple Leaf, you will search for gray whales, orcas, and porpoises before heading inland to explore the Great Bear Rainforest itself. Home to grizzly bears, black bears, and the elusive white Spirit Bear, this remote national park offers plenty of opportunities to view wildlife in its natural habitat. This 10-day trip starts at $2,630 per person.

• Alaska by Sail: Join Maple Leaf Adventures for a voyage that goes above and beyond the typical Alaska cruise. Sailing on the schooner Maple Leaf, you will sail along remote islands and rugged shoreline, view glaciers up close, search for whales and eagles, and enjoy opportunities to explore on your own. You will be able to kayak among archipelagoes, and hike in majestic temperate rainforest, accompanied by naturalist guides. This 12-day trip starts at $5,870 per person.

• Antarctica Wildlife Expedition: Explore one of the world’s most remote and wild places on this once-in-a-lifetime voyage. Setting off from Tierra del Fuego, you will cruise through the Drake Passage, a convergence of tides frequented by whales, porpoises and seabirds, before heading into the stunning frozen landscape that many penguin species call home. Cruise among icebergs and alongside glaciers, and enjoy learning about penguins and marine wildlife. Offered by Natural Habitat Adventures, this 10-day trip starts at $5,295 per person.

• Bahamas Dolphin Research: Feeling a little chilly after reading about Antarctica? Perhaps the warm waters of the Caribbean are for you. You will assist a long-term research project by observing the behavior of bottlenose and spotted dolphins as you snorkel the Bahamas’ characteristically clear waters. Offered by the Ocean Society, this 7-day trip starts at $2,890 per person.

Regardless of your destination, these small ship cruises offer the unique opportunity to get up close and personal with a wide variety of marine wildlife. More exhilarating than the typical cruise ship experience, these voyages are both more personalized and more adventuresome. Get ready for a life-changing experience on the open ocean as you support wildlife conservation.

Protecting El Salvador’s Largest Wetland From the Bottom Up

(Part 3 in a series exploring El Salvador)

Four volcanoes watched over us like sentries as we ate dinner on a covered dock which doubles as a waterfront dining area in the town of La Pirraya on an island in Jiquilisco Bay, El Salvador’s largest wetland. Our tour group of Americans sat out over the water watching the sunset and the fishing boats return with the day’s catch. Later huge bolts of lighting streak across the sky in the distance as the gentle waves slapped against the wooden posts of the dock. Nobody was on their smart phone, no car horns blared.

Jiquilisco Bay in many ways is an idyllic place. This bay, which includes mangrove forests, seagrass beds, many islands, and more is not only a place of great natural beauty; it’s a working landscape, providing sustenance and livelihoods for thousands of people. Industries that are based on the Bay and its forests include fishing, transportation, firewood collection, and tourism. Managing the Bay’s resources and ensuring that there is enough for everyone is a big job, too big for any single government agency or community organization.

During a weeklong tour I led in July 2013 to explore El Salvador, our group saw first hand how a coalition of community development and conservation groups are taking the lead in conserving this bay, protecting its wildlife, and reducing the environmental impact of fishing. We learned about the many threats to the bay’s ecosystem and visited projects run by local residents to make sure that the bounty of the bay can sustain both its human inhabitants as well as its wild ones. 

One sunny morning, our group boarded two “pangas”, the fiberglass boats that are the primary form of transportation around Jiquilisco. We headed out to explore the mangroves that are critical to the health of the Bay by providing habitat for birds and wildlife and a place for fish to reproduce. After years of degradation from fishing, agricultural pollution, and aquaculture projects, the mangrove is now growing again due to restoration efforts.

The main focus of our visit was to see and learn about sea turtles, of which 4 species live in and around this area, the hawksbill, green, leatherback and olive ridley turtles. After our boat tour, we headed to the town of Isla de Mendez to visit a sea turtle hatchery where eggs of olive ridley turtles are protected by Asociacion Mangle (a leading community-based development organization). While learning about this hopeful program, we received bad news.

Chema, our genial guide who works with our host organization EcoViva, shared the bad news with me. He got a call from one of his fishermen friends who spotted a dead hawksbill turtle near the edge of the nearby mangrove wetlands. A small group of us headed out by boat to retrieve the turtle and take it with us to hand it off to the staff of the Eastern PacificHawksbill Initiative (known by its acronym ICAPO), a conservation organization that is a partner of SEE Turtles.

Though the turtle was too decomposed to determine a cause of death, our partners were reasonably certain the culprit was fishing. The biggest threat to the hawksbills in the bay is blast fishing, where a combination of household chemicals are combined into a homemade bomb that kills everything in its wake. More than 20 hawksbills, many of which were adult females, have died from blast fishing in the past five years (fewer than 500 adult female hawksbills are estimated to exist in the entire region). Other types of fishing also impact turtles, including nets that entangle turtles and keep them from reaching the surface to breathe.

One of the primary areas of focus for Asociacion Mangle and EcoViva is promoting “pesca limpia” (“clean fishing” in English) where they promote hook and line fishing, which helps to reduce the number of turtles and other animals that are caught. This program helps to set up artificial reefs for fishermen that are monitored to make sure everyone follows regulations to ensure there are enough fish for everyone. Many former blast fishermen now participate in this program, which has helped to reduce the impact of explosives on certain areas of the Bay.

Fishing is just one of the threats to sea turtles in this area. ICAPO, EcoViva, and Asociacion Mangle also work to protect sea turtle nests by purchasing the eggs from local residents who formerly sold the eggs for consumption. Since consuming eggs (and other turtle products like meat) was banned in 2009, a network of hatcheries across the country has grown to receive the eggs, where they are protected until hatching. Among local conservation organizations, more than 1 million hatchlings have been released to the ocean to date.

Another risk to hawksbill survival is the commercial development of nesting beaches in the Bay. El Salvador is in line to receive a large influx of funding for economic development from the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US entity that handles some of our foreign aid. Local organizations are worried that coastal land critical to sea turtles and the maintenance of local livelihoods in the Bay may be the focus of large tourism developments. EcoViva has brought local residents to Washington DC to make sure that community leaders are involved in big decisions that will affect the area.

We visited one of these beaches at sunrise one morning. Our group was based in the town of La Pirraya, where ICAPO’s field operation is located. A knock came early on our door, alerting us that a hawksbill had been found by one of the local tortugueros (i.e. egg collector). We quickly dressed and hopped in the boat to head to the beach on the other side of the Bay. With the orange sunrise providing the entertainment, we arrived at the beach as the research team collected tissue samples and basic info such as length and width of the turtle’s shell. The researchers sent the female hawksbill on its way with brand new tags on its flippers.

After breakfast, our group set out to explore this fascinating bay. Winding through narrow channels, we saw some of the largest mangrove trees I’ve ever seen, some topping 50 feet tall. In addition to turtles, the Bay has 5 species of mangrove, more than 50 species of birds, and hundreds more species of fish and other animals. Our group’s bird enthusiast rattled off the avian species we saw including egrets, herons, and many more. After a stop off at ICAPO’s hawksbill hatchery and a round of coconut water, we hopped in the water to float on the outgoing tide.

Our main course of turtle watching came later that morning as we piled again into the pangas to look for black turtles (a sub-species of green turtle) that forage on seagrass in the Bay. Heading to a calm area near the peninsula that encloses most of the Bay, our group fell quiet as we looked for the small reptilian heads popping out of the water to take a breath.

It wasn’t long before the first turtle was spotted and ICAPO’s local field staff sprung into action, encircling the turtle with a large fishing net so the research team could bring it into the boat. Once the turtle was in the net, we motored the boat around the edge of the net until we found the big male. Neftali, the ever-smiling local coordinator for ICAPO hopped in the water and I followed behind, helping free the turtle from the net and passing it to our colleagues waiting in the boat.

These black turtles remain a mystery here in Jiquilisco; few nest here and researchers don’t yet know how many are around. Though most of the turtles they find are untagged juveniles and adults, once a turtle was found with tags from the Galapagos, so ICAPO staff suspect they migrate from the Ecuadorean islands here to feed and grow. The male we found was the first of several we would spot that day. Several of our group had the opportunity to help collect the data and release the turtles back into the water, a highlight of the trip for several people.

The following day, as our group took its final boat ride across Jiquilisco Bay to the port town of Puerto Parada, I enjoyed in the tranquil views and the calm that comes after unplugging for several days. At more than 150,000 acres, the Bay seems immense but with tens of thousands of people using it every day and depending on it for survival, grassroots efforts to protect its resources are more important than ever.

Read the first two parts of the series:

-Part 1: Rebuilding from theAshes of El Salvador’s Civil War

-Part 2: A New AgriculturalRevolution Takes Root in El Salvador

Learn more about the El Salvador Sea Turtles and Community Development trip.