Within the San Lorenzo Bay of Honduras, salt farms present golden alternatives for sustaining generations—of individuals, of shorebirds, of an artisanal lifestyle.
From the Summer time 2024 concern of Dwelling Fowl journal. Subscribe now.
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“I’m the third era of a household of artisanal salt producers in San Lorenzo,” says Julia Salazar proudly. She is the daughter of Julio Salazar, who has been harvesting salt from this bay on the Pacific coast of Honduras since 1988—and granddaughter of Sabas Nicolas Salazar Molina, who got here to the bay in 1928 from an inland city, attracted by the chance of this valuable mineral.
“As a toddler,” Julia Salazar recollects, “I bear in mind waking up at daybreak and watching the gathering of what individuals right here name oro blanco [white gold].”
In Honduras all salt manufacturing is artisanal, a small-scale agricultural operation principally carried out by hand. Staff sweep shallow pans of seawater with push brooms to pile up mounds of salt. The area round San Lorenzo Bay provides many of the nation’s salt, upwards of 75% of all of the salt harvested in Honduras. However past the lapping waves of the Pacific and the large mounds of white gold swept up by the salt harvesters, Julia Salazar remembers one thing else distinctive from her childhood rising up on San Lorenzo Bay—the birds. And particularly, one hen that captured her coronary heart: the Black-necked Stilt, often known as soldadito [little soldier], as a result of the best way it walks resembles the best way troopers march.
“It was this species that caught my consideration essentially the most and made me ponder birds extra,” she says, recalling how as a little bit woman she grew to become fascinated with the habits of the stilts strolling round in search of meals, and nesting within the saltgrass simply above the flats of the factitious lagoons contained in the household salt farm. “What me essentially the most was how each the female and male shield their nests and chicks,” says Salazar, who at present is a mom of three. “I felt very recognized with that.”
That maternal bond between Salazar and the stilts has grown into her life’s work, as she is now advocating for the safety of those shorebirds and their nests within the San Lorenzo Bay. For the previous decade, she has been a frontrunner in a cross-disciplinary effort amongst companies and biologists to lift consciousness and safeguards for the mangrove forests and intertidal wetlands that make this bay one of the vital necessary ecosystems within the nation. In 2022, the buildup of knowledge about shorebird concentrations within the area resulted within the designation of the Punta Condega–Jicarito wetland system as a 112,000-acre website of regional significance within the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Community—the primary WHSRN website in all of Honduras.
Salazar’s journey to assist achieve nationwide and worldwide recognition for the San Lorenzo Bay has been a winding one, from tourism to birding to fostering a way of group empowerment among the many salt farmers. However the one fixed has been the drive and imaginative and prescient of Julia Salazar herself.
“What stands out most about her is her management,” says Osvel Hinojosa-Huerta, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Coastal Options Fellows program, which Salazar joined in 2023. “She has managed to convey collectively numerous salt producers and helped them study shorebirds and the position that salt manufacturing performs of their conservation.”
A Custom Greater than Two Millennia Outdated
The observe of harvesting salt within the San Lorenzo Bay goes again greater than 2,000 years earlier than the Spanish conquest, when the Indigenous Chorotega individuals migrated from Mexico and settled in what’s now El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Their livelihoods revolved round fishing, mangrove logging, and salt manufacturing—all the time deeply intertwined with the ebb and movement of the tides.
The Chorotega harvested salt by evaporating seawater by way of boiling—a observe that required slicing down mangrove bushes for firewood, and that continued with the arrival of the Spaniards firstly of the sixteenth century. Salt harvesting was necessary for the preservation of fish and meat. The Spanish additionally used salt to make their foreign money. Colonial mining actions close to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, required salt for the amalgamation means of silver and gold, which spurred the salt trade within the Gulf of Fonseca.
The upper demand for salt known as for simpler and more cost effective processes. Originally of the twentieth century, the salt trade started to depend on shallow tanks known as dry-racks that seize daylight to enhance the evaporation of seawater. This innovation not solely improved the standard and yield of salt, it relieved strain on mangrove forests. And, the salt pans created new habitats for shorebirds to wade by way of and pick aquatic invertebrates within the shallow evaporating swimming pools of sea water. Together with its in depth muddy plains and estuaries, the San Lorenzo Bay at present is taken into account very important breeding and migratory stopover habitat for shorebirds.
“The Gulf of Fonseca (which incorporates San Lorenzo Bay) is of nice significance for a number of species of shorebirds, such because the Semipalmated Sandpiper and Least Sandpiper, as a result of it’s a resting and feeding space,” says Nicaraguan hen ecologist Salvadora Morales, a conservation specialist for the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Community. “Some species just like the soldadito even use it as a breeding space.”
In 1999 the San Lorenzo Bay and 6 different neighboring areas within the Gulf of Fonseca gained recognition as a wetland website of worldwide significance below the Ramsar Conference, partly because of the important congregations of shorebirds. The designation additionally acknowledged the area as essential habitat for hawksbill and ridley sea turtles, American crocodiles, and imperiled mangrove intertidal wetlands.
“The location, principally mangrove forest, is among the nation’s most necessary ecosystems,” reads the official declaration for Ramsar website quantity 1000.
However regardless of the lofty declaration, the Ramsar designation did little to mitigate the gulf’s vulnerability to nationwide and worldwide company pursuits, like increasing agricultural improvement for rising melons and sugarcane, and the burgeoning shrimp trade. Because the center of the twentieth century, the Gulf of Fonseca has misplaced about half of its unique wetland forest cowl. “The problem lies in having protecting declarations with out ample funds for implementation,” laments Jorge Palma, Julia Salazar’s husband and the technical director of a nationwide park in central Honduras.
As San Lorenzo’s Birds Acquire Consideration, Ecotourists Take Observe
Julia Salazar graduated from school in 2009 and returned residence to her household’s salt farm—the Salinera Santa Alejandra—with a level in tourism from the Technological College of Honduras. At college she gained expertise conducting excursions for the general public, and now she had a need to assist Hondurans be taught in regards to the artisanal tradition of the salineras of San Lorenzo Bay.
She began by making a tour of her household’s salt farm, and she or he named her challenge Sal Para La Conservación [Salt for Conservation], with a broader mission to guard the marine-coastal ecosystems of southern Honduras. Finally she hoped to unite all of San Lorenzo’s salt producers below the banner of environmentally pleasant productiveness.
In 2012 Salazar launched a easy Fb web page providing instructional excursions to anyone curious to study salt manufacturing and its ecological advantages. Faculty academics and college professors instantly responded to join the excursions. However then Salazar says the excursions began attracting a unique type of buyer: “We curiously additionally began receiving visits from birders, attracted by the benefit that the salt farms present for shorebird watching … vacationers from Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, after which from the united statesA. and Europe.”
Instantly Salazar had a renewed curiosity within the Black-necked Stilts that she had watched as a little bit woman, and she or he took nearer discover of the little rock-like brown eggs on her household’s salinera alongside the shores of San Lorenzo Bay.
“I found small nests made with seashells, small rocks, and branches, containing three to 4 eggs guarded by dad and mom keen to struggle to guard them,” Salazar says. “I realized that they all the time nest earlier than the start of the rains on the shores of the lagoons within the salt farms. Alone initiative I began monitoring the lagoons month-to-month searching for nests or chicks.”
Salazar’s personal observations documented that Black-necked Stilts additionally nest in shrimp farms, although she says they discover artisanal salt farms to be a extra peaceable setting for elevating chicks: “There’s far much less disturbance than elsewhere.”
Appreciation Grows for the Worth of Shorebirds—and the Hemispheric Significance of San Lorenzo Bay
Round 2014, Salazar’s salt farm excursions attracted biologists from Aves Honduras, a nonprofit ornithological affiliation, who began conducting official yearly shorebird inhabitants surveys in San Lorenzo Bay. The shorebird census knowledge popping out of San Lorenzo Bay then attracted the eye of biologists from the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Community, a world conservation science partnership that has recognized and seeks safety for about 120 critical-habitat websites for shorebirds all through the Americas.
“I accompanied a biologist from Aves Honduras to watch the habits of Himantopus mexicanus [Black-necked Stilt] and Anarhynchus wilsonia, often known as the Wilson’s Plover,” Salazar says. These experiences marked a big shift in her relationship with shorebirds. Whereas she initially centered her efforts for Sal Para La Conservación on organizing excursions and selling salt manufacturing, she felt her position evolving into gathering important knowledge to grasp how salt farms help shorebird habitats.
However first, she must persuade her father. As a result of just like the overwhelming majority of salt farmers and neighboring shrimp farmers within the bay, Julio Salazar thought the birds had been a menace.
“We thought their droppings someway affected the salt,” he says. He additionally thought the shorebirds depredated a shrimp-farming plot he was working: “I assumed they ate them. So I used to shoot them with the shotgun.”
Undeterred, Julia Salazar started selling shorebird watching on the Sal Para La Conservación excursions, and in 2020 she parlayed her personal casual hen surveys on the salt farms right into a workers place with the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Community, the place she grew to become the salt and shorebirds conservation specialist for the WHSRN Flyways Program. Her job centered on growing a shorebird-conservation-oriented salt-production evaluation, establishing shorebird-friendly salt manufacturing greatest practices, and figuring out the threats and advantages to shorebirds at salt manufacturing websites.
Shorebird surveys carried out by way of WHSRN and Aves Honduras within the San Lorenzo Bay and surrounding areas yielded important concentrations—greater than 12,000 Western Sandpipers counted in a single place, and one other depend of 5,000 Semipalmated Sandpipers, a hen cited as a Tipping Level Species within the 2022 State of the Birds report. (Tipping Level Species have declined 50% prior to now 50 years, and are on monitor to lose one other half of their current inhabitants within the subsequent 50 years.)
At excessive tide, one of many counts discovered a gathering of greater than 100 American Oystercatchers, together with some with leg bands that indicated that they had been marked on their breeding grounds from Massachusetts to Florida by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists. Different counts tallied mixed-species clusters of greater than 20,000 sandpipers, stilts, and avocets—together with Stilt Sandpiper and Whimbrel, each Tipping Level Species.
The sturdy shorebird knowledge made the case for the primary Honduran WHSRN Web site of Regional Significance, designated in 2022 within the Punta Condega–El Jicarito wetlands ecosystem within the japanese Gulf of Fonseca. It additionally grew to become the primary declared WHSRN website that hosts important numbers of Double-striped Thick-knees, a big shorebird species that ranges from Central to South America.
“The declaration of an necessary website for Punta Condega-El Jicarito System is a chance for native actors to hold out concrete habitat administration actions for the conservation of shorebirds,” says Morales, the WHSRN shorebird conservation specialist. “We’ve already managed to get shrimp farms within the space to affix the community for hen monitoring.”
All the eye for shorebird habitat round San Lorenzo Bay has raised the profile of the Sal Para La Conservación excursions. About 5,500 vacationers and college students have taken the excursions thus far, together with the U.S. ambassador to Honduras.
“We grew to become a hotspot for birdwatchers,” says Salazar, who says the birders helped change her father’s thoughts in regards to the birds. Now the choice income generated by the excursions represents 5% of the salt farm’s annual revenue, and a mannequin is being established for bird-friendly salt manufacturing. “My dad has a unique mentality and participates within the excursions, welcoming friends and displaying them the corporate his father based.”
In essence, Salazar says the spirit of her challenge is selling a way of belonging amongst San Lorenzo’s salt producers, to the encircling nature on which they rely—and likewise to the craft of their work.
“Once we enable the producer to be a part of these initiatives and present them the amazement and curiosity of many about their work, we’re opening necessary paths so as to add productive sectors to the conservation of the pure setting of the south of Honduras,” she says.
Official Safety, and a seamless position for ecotourism
In March 2023 the federal government of Honduras formally ratified the WHSRN website declaration of the Punta Condega–El Jicarito wetlands ecosystem with Legislative Decree 5-99-E, which categorized the land below the class of Habitat Administration.
However Salazar fears that, as with the Ramsar website designation 25 years in the past, the precise conservation affect may very well be minimal, because the Habitat Administration designation included no motion plan to bolster administration and preservation.
Given the low ranges of state funding that the central authorities can put into Habitat Administration lands in southern Honduras, Salazar sees birding tourism and sustainable, artisanal salt farms as the perfect hope for making certain the way forward for San Lorenzo Bay as essential habitat for tens of hundreds of shorebirds. Final yr, in a presentation to the Coastal Options Fellows program on the Cornell Lab, she spoke about her imaginative and prescient for integrating salt manufacturing and shorebird conservation within the Gulf of Fonseca. Salazar’s discuss deeply impressed the administration of the CSF program, which funds cross-disciplinary initiatives in 9 Latin American international locations alongside the Pacific Flyway to pilot progressive science-based tasks that profit shorebirds and human communities.
“Coastal Options tasks want to supply options to implement efficient conservation methods which might be primarily based on the participation of various disciplines and sectors, particularly native communities and stakeholders, and will embody governance mechanisms, equivalent to new public insurance policies, to ensure the success of those initiatives in the long run,” says Osvel Hinojosa-Huerta, the CSF director. “Julia’s challenge excelled at overlaying all of these necessities.”
Salazar was chosen as a Coastal Options Fellow to launch a shorebird conservation initiative that promotes the issuance of environmental licenses for salt farms, the event of other income streams for salt producers, and the celebration of native, artisanal salt traditions to place San Lorenzo Bay as a vacationer vacation spot. Along with her CSF challenge, she is now working with 78 different salt producers within the bay (a few quarter of whom are ladies) to assist them replicate the success at her household’s salinera, turning birdwatching tourism into a further, sustainable income. (Learn in regards to the success of a separate salt-and-shorebirds challenge occurring in Guatemala.)
As together with her father, Salazar’s work with different farmers within the bay begins with explaining that shorebirds aren’t a menace to salt high quality or shrimp manufacturing. Quite the opposite, they’re bioindicators of marine-coastal ecosystem well being. Salazar says she assures locals that shorebirds sometimes don’t eat shrimp, however choose small worms, mollusks, and crustaceans that dwell underground. And because of the hemispheric migrations of some shorebird species, from Alaska all the best way to Chile and Argentina, the birds act as a hyperlink between distant ecosystems—their defecation doesn’t spoil the salt, however moderately circulates vitamins and makes ecosystems extra productive.
The locals say that Salazar’s outreach has opened quite a lot of eyes in regards to the wealthy pure useful resource of shorebirds in San Lorenzo Bay.
“Julia Salazar got here to show us the true significance of migratory birds within the setting,” says Marcio Molina, a salt producer within the bay since 1982. “I imagine that the whole salt manufacturing sector was completely unaware of those birds, and now now we have begun to worth what it means to look after them and help them after they go by way of.”
“After Julia introduced us this information, I started to cease and take a look at the birds, differentiate them, and see their shapes and colours,” says Delia Hernandez, one other of the San Lorenzo salt producers. “That has helped me perceive that typically we actually don’t worth what now we have as a result of we all know nothing about it.”
Finally, Salazar sees the combination of shorebirds into salt manufacturing as a possible solution to improve salt product certifications, thus boosting costs. She says it’s a solution to incentivize salt farmers towards ecosystem safety, and away from farm growth into protected areas.
“Increasing land doesn’t invariably equate to elevated income,” she says.
As she continues to recruit the salt producers as allies of conservation, Salazar and different companions in Sal Para La Conservacion put on T-shirts adorned with a Black-necked Stilt—a logo of the union between shorebirds and all pure lifetime of San Lorenzo Bay, and of the historic and cultural legacy of artisanal salt manufacturing.
And to at the present time, Salazar continues to stroll her household’s salinera and watch the stilts, checking in on their nests.
“After so a few years, it’s nonetheless fascinating each time,” she says. “It nonetheless appears like a brand new journey.
“They’re like outdated buddies you might be pleased to see once more. I can’t think about the salt farm with out them.”
Concerning the Creator
Jorge Rodríguez is a contract science journalist who lives in Guatemala Metropolis, Guatemala. After working for the Guatemalan newspapers Prensa Libre and Siglo Veintiuno, Rodríguez grew to become a contract journalist specializing in tales about sustainable improvement, the setting, and Indigenous peoples. His writing has been printed by Nationwide Geographic, Mongabay, the Every day Beast, and the Earth Journalism Community. In 2015 he based the web information web site Viatori, which focuses on local weather change, science, sustainability, and Indigenous peoples points in Guatemala and the remainder of Central America.
Concerning the Photographer
Jesús Moo Yam is a contract conservation photographer in Campeche, Mexico, the place he additionally leads images and birding workshops. His photographs have been printed within the American Birding Affiliation’s Birding journal.
About The Coastal Options Fellows Program
Since 2019 the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Coastal Options Fellows program has empowered 30 younger scientists, engineers, architects, and coverage specialists from Mexico to Chile to work collectively and invent new approaches to habitat conservation that may flip across the Western Hemisphere’s shorebird declines.
“We’re bringing collectively the perfect and brightest younger Latin American scientists and innovators to assume otherwise, work in live performance with communities, and obtain outstanding on-the-ground conservation outcomes,” says Osvel Hinojosa-Huerta, CSF program director.
CSF tasks combine land-use planning and conservation coverage to work with and alongside communities on altering behaviors and creating legal guidelines for sustainable conservation. In 5 years, this system has helped shield greater than 286,000 acres of shorebird habitat by way of administration agreements, conservation easements, native ordinances, and nationwide laws. Altogether, these habitat victories have instantly benefitted populations of 28 precedence shorebird species, together with Snowy Plovers, Hudsonian Godwits, and Whimbrels. Study extra extra within the Coastal Options Fellows program Impression Report.—Gustave Axelson
In Guatemala, One other Salt-for-Shorebirds Effort Takes Off
Alongside the Pacific Coast of Guatemala, Cornell Lab of Ornithology Coastal Options Fellow Varinia Sagastume is implementing a technique just like Julia Salazar’s challenge in Honduras—integrating birdwatching tourism into shrimp and salt manufacturing, and producing a way of accountability and reference to nature amongst native communities.
In 2021, the challenge educated 36 residents of Sipacate, a small coastal village that is determined by salt manufacturing, and supported them in creating hen monitoring group within the salt flats. Fifteen ladies from this group grew to become licensed tour guides by the Guatemalan authorities, and so they had been additionally educated to contribute knowledge to organic analysis teams learning Guatemalan marine coastal ecosystems.
The emergence of birding tour guides on this economically challenged space created a brand new and environmentally sustainable job market. Within the final 4 years, birding has change into a very talked-about exercise, with extremely sought-after shorebirds equivalent to White-rumped Sandpiper and Hudsonian Godwit making stopovers alongside the Guatemalan Pacific.
As with Julia Salazar’s Sal Para La Conservacion initiative in Honduras, this challenge is mobilizing regionally led conservation efforts that emphasize the significance of ecosystem contributions to individuals’s livelihoods.
“It can be crucial that we take actions to guard these websites,” says Sagastume, who’s a conservation specialist for Fundación Defensores de la Naturaleza in addition to a Coastal Options Fellow. “If we don’t, not solely does it have an effect on the birds and different animals that dwell in estuaries, but additionally the productive financial and social methods that develop in and round these ecosystems.” —Jorge Rodríguez