To Christmas Count Participants and Other Interested Individuals,

I was urged to share this email I had sent to our Hinesburg CBC participants with the wider Vt birding community. Maybe with enough donations we can help increase the area of protected, high carbon storing, tropical forest in the conservation project described below, with the hope that we could mitigate some of the affects of our Christmas count vehicle usage.



Greetings Birders,

Just wanted to follow up with everyone regarding our carbon footprint discussion from last Sunday evening. To update those of you who were not part of the post count Zoom meeting, I voiced my continued grumblings about all the driving we birders do chasing birds and how car centric Christmas bird counts are in particular. In discussing what we could do about it and how difficult it is to detach ourselves from vehicles in rural counts such as ours, Richard Littauer suggested we could come up with something to at least offset our carbon footprint. 

Several ideas were kicked around and we decided I would look into how we could all make contributions to an organization whose director, Eric Palola, lives in the count circle and whose parents, Erny and Darlene Palola, have participated in the count for many years. The organization,The Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund (GDFCF), based in NW Costa Rica, works with the Costa Rican government to develop and manage the 417,000 acre "Area de Conservacion Guanacaste" (ACG), a sprawling, interconnected system of protected areas of marine ecosystems, and dry and wet tropical forests. Notably, ACG is  “Home to 2.6% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity and is the only protected area in the Neotropics that sweeps from Pacific ocean waters up and over the volcanic mountain range of the continental divide and down into the lowlands of the Atlantic rain forest”. Additionally, it now protects the largest area of dry tropical forest in Central America , much of it reclaimed from degraded cattle lands purchased over the past 40 years that have now regenerated back to forest.

I spoke with Eric this week about our idea to offset our count generated carbon footprint. Excited about our interest in GDFCF, he pointed out that, in particular, wet tropical forests in ACG have some of the  highest carbon storage abilities on the planet. He also mentioned that they are actively pursuing new land acquisitions, particularly forests, or land that will grow back to forest, on the wetter Atlantic side of the preserve where these best carbon sequestering forests occur. If we wanted, he suggested we could earmark our donations to be used specifically for these land purchases. 

Below is a link to GDFCF’s interesting website full of information about the amazing history and successes of this innovative, world class organization. You can make a donation, however large or small you like, using a credit card, PayPal, or send a check to Eric at the Huntington address.  In the notes for my donation ,  I put something like “For land acquisition, Christmas bird count carbon offset”.   

Thanks for helping,
Paul

https://www.gdfcf.org