Peruvian dry life: between the Andes and the Pacific, an arid landscape harbors abundant life

Natural History, Nov, 2004 by Robert S.R. Williams

This November 21, PBS will air director Kevin Macdonald's film Touching, the Void, shot on location in the Peruvian Andes. It recounts the famous mountaineering story of a climber who falls, shatters his leg, and barely escapes with his life. If the spectacular scenery in the movie inspires you to travel to Peru, be sure to allow time to visit what biologists call the Tumbesian region, encompassing the extreme southwestern corner of Ecuador and the northwestern corner of Peru.

At first, the Tumbesian region may sound uninviting: It is a parched, rural, thinly forested landscape sandwiched between the western slopes of the Andes and the Pacific Ocean. Its plains are overgrazed, and its forests are overlogged. Yet it is also a global hot spot of biodiversity, with scores of endemic species of amphibians, birds, mammals, plants, and reptiles. As a whole, the region supports nearly sixty endemic bird species and about ten endemic species of mammals. Some 20 percent of the plant species and a staggering 60 percent of the reptiles and amphibians occur nowhere else in the world. Endemic species are numerous here in part because of the surrounding climatic and topographical barriers. The Pacific lies to the west, the towering Andes to the east, the wet forests to the north, and the Atacama Desert--the most rainless place on Earth--to the south. The cold waters of the off-shore Humboldt Current, as well as the proximity of the Andean peaks, play a role in the dryness and stability of the climate.

The region is also the locus of 1,500 years of dramatic and bloody human history. For a millennium before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the early sixteenth century, great cities flourished close to what is now the lively Peruvian coastal city of Chiclayo, as they did elsewhere in Peru. Huge pre-Inca pyramids and palaces, lavish burial sites, and extensive aqueducts have been uncovered near Chiclayo, at sites such as Batan Grande, Sican, Sipan, and Tucume. The peoples who built those cities maintained transportation networks connecting inland farms with coastal fisheries.

In 1532 the Spanish adventurer Francisco Pizarro and his recruits entered the Tumbesian region, initiating an era of colonization, accelerated population expansion, shipbuilding, and the conversion of forests to cropland. By the twentieth century the dry forests were severely depleted and degraded. Yet conservation planning was impossible until 1998, when a half-century-long border dispute between Ecuador and Peru was finally resolved. Today a consortium called Bosques Sin Fronteras (Forests without Borders) is working, in collaboration with the region's inhabitants, to conserve and rehabilitate about 2,500 square miles of the surviving Tumbesian dry forest.

In one of the more remote pockets of that forest, about fifty miles in land from Chiclayo, is the first community-owned ecological reserve in Peru, the 133-square-mile Chaparri Private Conservation Area. The reserve was created four years ago through the joint efforts of a wildlife photographer, a bear biologist, a conservation ecologist, and the 500 families of Santa Catalina de Chongoyape, within whose communal lands the reserve is situated. The Chaparri reserve is one of the first tangible steps toward realizing the goals of Bosques Sin Fronteras. It has become a refuge for endangered species, a haven for individual damaged animals, a recovery site for plant life, and an employment opportunity for local residents. It is also a place where a traveler can spend an afternoon sitting beside a stream and watching hordes of hummingbirds from a dozen feet away.

Communities nearby, having observed Chaparri's successes, are seeking to establish a network of such reserves. The goal is that within five years a biological corridor--provisionally known as Gran Chaparri--will be in place. Not only would it protect a huge swath of the southern Tumbesian region, but it would also allow local residents to pursue their traditional practices, including grazing herds of goats and cattle.

Unfortunately the very uniqueness and isolation of the region now threatens many of its flora and fauna: only about 5 percent of the once-thriving forests remain in a healthy state of conservation, and many species of birds and mammals have been hunted to extinction. The wild population of the white-winged guan, for instance--a critically endangered Tumbesian bird thought to be extinct until it was rediscovered in 1977--still numbers fewer than 250 birds. Nevertheless, even a habitat subjected to enormous stress can still hold surprises: at Chaparri, several seemingly new species have been discovered, including a porcupine and a cat.

Conservation initiatives already under way, at Chaparri include a five-year moratorium on hunting white-tailed deer; a wetland restoration project; and the levying of an annual grazing fee of roughly three dollars per animal, which every herder must pay. Reforestation, too, has begun: more than four tolls of native mesquite seed have been sown at the reserve's lower elevations. In addition, some 1,500 nursery-grown native fruit trees, mostly guava, have been planted, and a drip-irrigation system has been installed to ensure their longevity.