Rainforest Project – experiential learning in the Costa Rican jungle

The dense rainforest of Rara Avis is absolutely spectacular

Between March 4 and March 18 Connecticut Audubon Society staff members will be travelling to the Costa Rican rainforest again to teach Connecticut high school students about the importance of rainforest conservation as part of the Forman School Rainforest Project. This unique hands-on biology course based out of the Forman School in Litchfield, but also catering to high school seniors and juniors of the local public high schools (Litchfield High School and Wamogo Regional School), is currently in its 19th year. Every year a group of 12-14 students travels to the remote rainforest preserve Rara Avis, where they work around the clock studying the areas biodiversity and developing sustainable non-timber resource projects that can provide local people with alternatives to the commonly used slash-and-burn method of agriculture. Since its inception the project has been a demonstration project of sorts, researching different ways to demonstrate the tremendous value of an intact rainforest – both biologically and financially. Because once people realize that it pays to leave forest intact and use its resources intelligently rather than replacing it with poor quality pasture land, a major step has been taken towards the preservation of these important habitats.

 Every year students build on the knowledge and experience previous teams have accumulated. The students are directed and supported in their endeavors by a support staff of experts in their respective fields. Connecticut Audubon Society’s Frank Gallo, Associate Director of our Coastal Center at Milford Point is a master bird bander and expert on Neotropical migrants. He will be joining the program for the 9th time this year to run his banding station in Rara Avis. His team’s work will help us better understand the needs of some of the migratory birds we see in Connecticut during the summer months while they are on their wintering grounds. Birds are caught and banded so they can be individually recognized. Some of the migrants banded in Rara Avis are just passing through on their way north, but Frank’s work has already shown that some species winter right there. For example a Chestnut-sided Warbler banded in Rara Avis was recaptured twice more over a four year period, each time in the same line of trees and roughly on the same date! This kind of information helps us understand how to better protect our migratory birds when they are not in Connecticut and provides insights in the poorly known parts of these amazing animal’s biology. Frank and his team also carry out studies on the local hummingbird populations and document the avian diversity in the preserve each year. 

Frank Gallo holding a Wood Thrush he just banded. This bird winters in Costa Rica but may show up in our forests later in the year to breed.

Conservation Biologist Twan Leenders is one of the original staff members of the project and has been involved for 18 years. Twan is an expert on Central American amphibians and reptiles and very familiar with the other animals and plants in the area since he was the preserve’s manager in the past. Twan he has been studying declining amphibian populations in Costa Rica for many years and his team has been documenting the recovery of some critically endangered amphibian species in the preserve, species that have all but gone extinct after being infected with a water-borne pathogen in the late 1980s. Even though the devastating effects of this disease on amphibian populations are best known from the tropics where many species are going extinct while researchers frantically try to come up with creative ways to save them, this is truly a global phenomenon and the pathogen has been reported from all continents, including North America. Twan is also involved with research programs in Connecticut that monitor local amphibian populations and track the spread of the disease.

Rainforest Project students identify and collect measurements on local moths at night

As the scientific advisor of the project, Twan oversees the other projects that students will be working on this year, such as a spider project that researches the possibility to sustainably harvest silk from the Golden Orb-weaver (Nephila clavipes), a fiber that has great industrial potential and spurred a multi-million dollar industry that is attempting to artificially synthesize the silk rather than extract it. Another team will be researching moth diversity in Rara Avis, a group of animals that still remains largely unstudied. Lastly, a fourth team will be researching the ecology of the volcanic streams that cross the extremely wet Rara Avis rainforest ecosystem. In the past, teams have also worked on radio telemetry of rainforest mammals (ranging from bats to tapirs), researching the potential to sustainably harvest and market canopy orchids, and studying potential pharmaceutical uses of the venom of the largest Neotropical ant, the bullet ant (Paraponera clavata) in treatment of stroke victims.

Please check back later for updates from this year’s project.

All photographs © Twan Leenders