The folk at Nature Canada recently blogged about the progress of their bird and forest conservation project in Haiti:
Nature Canada’s Director of Conservation, Mara Kerry, is on the Caribbean Island of Hispaniola this week to pay a visit to Nature Canada’s conservation and development projects in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
We’ve been working with our BirdLife partner in Haiti, Haitian Audubon Society, on an integrated conservation and development project supported by the Canadian International Development Agency.
One of our projects has involved rebuilding the local school in Formon, hiring teachers and providing free education to the children of parents who adopt sustainable forest management practices.
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The community of Formon is on the edge of Macaya National Park, an important wintering habitat for Canadian migratory birds like the Bicknell’s Thrush, a secretive and threatened songbird that breeds in Atlantic Canada. Threats to the songbird, which has declined in Maritime Canada (Nova Scotia and New Brunswick) by 15% annually over the last two decades, include atmospheric pollution, climate change and loss or degradation of its forest habitats.
The project provides an incentive – children attend school for free if their parents agree to stop cutting down the forest and help with reforestation – for the community to adopt sustainable forest management practices which relieve pressure on important habitat for migratory birds. Over 80% of the parents have agreed, and for second year in a row, the school has offered hope for 300 girls and boys.
You can read the entire post at the Nature Canada blog (an update from the Dominican Republic should be posted there sometime in the next few days).
For some background on the conservation project, see this previous Green Antilles post: Conservation action for the Bicknell’s Thrush in the Caribbean.
