Every year, between November and February, the golden-cheeked warbler makes its way down from the U.S. state of Texas to Central America. But as it travels to find refuge from the winter, this tiny, endangered bird, Setophaga chrysoparia, with its bright-yellow cheeks and a buzzing song, seems unable to evade habitat loss. More than 90% of the golden-cheeked warbler population winters in a region that is at increased risk of deforestation, experts are warning. It isn’t alone. Dozens of migratory and native forest birds in Central America could see as much as two-thirds of their habitats threatened by encroaching narco-trafficking activity that drives deforestation, according to recently published research. More than half of the migratory species analyzed had more than a quarter of their global populations in landscapes that have become more vulnerable to drug-related deforestation in Central America. And this is only for the migratory species that breed in North America, the study authors say. The Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala. Large-scale deforestation in the region has been linked, in part, to narco-trafficking, say experts. Image courtesy of CIFOR via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). They found that antidrug policies can push narco-trafficking into more remote forest areas, many of which represent important bird landscapes. Some of the areas that have become more vulnerable as a result lie within Central America’s Five Great Forests: the Maya Forest in Guatemala, the Indio-Maiz in Nicaragua, the Tortuguero in Costa Rica, and the Moskitia in Honduras. The study found that since 1970, deforestation…This article was originally published on Mongabay
Article by:
This story first appeared on Mongabay
South Africa Today – Environment
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
