The Motmot Crew (Richland Center-Santa Teresa Sister City Project)

The Motmot Crew is back for its third year, supporting Birdathon projects and bird welfare in Nicaragua’s Rio Escalante-Chacocente Wildlife Refuge!

Chacocente has been designated an Important Bird Area (IBA) by Birdlife International, encompassing tropical dry forest that is the winter home to many North American species, including Wood Thrushes, Yellow-throated Vireos, Great-crested Flycatchers, and Yellow Warblers.

Our team is anchored by a group of birders associated with the Richland Center – Santa Teresa Sister City Project (SCP), linking communities in Wisconsin and Nicaragua. In 2017, SCP birders helped to start a Monitoring Overwinter Survival (MoSI) station in the reserve, now led by a Nicaraguan bird bander who trains apprentices from the Chacocente villages. The SCP bird project offers bird education to the village school kids, providing binoculars, bird classes, and bird walks, generating lots of enthusiasm for local birds. See more at https://santa-teresa.org.

On May 14 our Motmot crew will visit birding spots near our homes in the Driftless Area to find as many bird species as possible on a single day (while following recommendations for protection against Covid-19). Half of the pledge proceeds will go to the many valuable priority projects of the Bird Protection Fund in Wisconsin, and the other half will directly support the SCP’s bird conservation work in the Chacocente refuge.

Please consider helping us with a donation. You can click the blue Donate button above to contribute online or by mailing a check to: Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin, ATTN: Great Wisconsin Birdathon, 211 S. Paterson St., Suite 100, Madison, WI 53703 (and include "Motmot Crew" in the memo line!)

So what’s a Motmot? A beautiful Chacocente resident bird that makes our “motley crew” pale by comparison!

About MoSI

Monitoreo de Sobrevivencia Invernal (Monitoring Overwinter Survival) is a cooperative network of bird monitoring stations within Latin America that encourages conservation efforts through population monitoring. MoSI stations gather data on migrants from North America to learn about migration, declines, and where the problems are most acute. The stations also gather important data on the resident birds. MoSI stations are run by independent banders, university scientists, Latin American government personnel, and non-profit conservation groups, such as our Richland Center - Santa Teresa Sister City Project. To learn more about MoSI stations, visit the Institute for Bird Populations website.

About the Sister City Project

Our 30-year-old sister city relationship connects two rural small towns, Richland Center, Wisconsin, and Santa Teresa, Nicaragua. Since 1998, at the request of its mayor, we have been focusing on the sea turtles and the remote villages in the Rio Escalante-Chacocente Wildlife Refuge, a 10,000 acre national reserve within the Santa Teresa municipality. Chacocente is known for its globally important olive ridley sea turtle arribada (mass-nesting) beach and Nicaragua’s largest remaining area of the deciduous tropical dry forest. This ecosystem once covered the Pacific slope from Mexico to Costa Rica, but only 2% is left.

The Chacocente families are subsistence farmers, and when we started working with them had few wells, latrines, and educational and money-making opportunities. Slash and burn farming was common, and selling sea turtle eggs was one of few cash income sources. Poverty and the struggle of local communities to satisfy their needs through an unsuitable use of their natural resources had negatively impacted Chacocente’s biodiversity.

An important focus has been basic health and sanitation, providing materials for village-built wells and latrines, water filters, and training village health volunteers. We support education by building schools, delivering school supplies, and giving scholarships to enable Chacocente students to attend secondary school. Ecological agriculture and gardening programs have helped protect the fragile forest. These, as well as grants for village women entrepreneurs, have bettered people’s incomes.

We have promoted sea turtle conservation, providing field supplies for community guards at the arribada beach, initiating a successful campaign to make sea-turtle egg-taking illegal, and supporting a leatherback sea turtle hatchery. Our Nicaraguan coordinator, biologist Alma Susana Chávez, gives environmental education classes in the schools and takes the lead in all environmental work. The MoSI station was begun in 2017 in collaboration with the organization Paso Pacifico, as part of their USFWS grant to learn more about the life cycle of certain declining migratory bird species. The SCP is now fully sponsoring the station.

Make a donation online by clicking "donate" above, or mail a check to: Natural Resources Foundation of Wisconsin, ATTN: Great Wisconsin Birdathon, 211 S. Paterson St., Suite 100, Madison, WI 53703 (and include "Motmot Crew" in the memo line!)