EVANGELIST FOR NATURE - Once a missionary, Jose Alvarez now searches Amazonia for new species-and preaches salvation for their imperiled habitat

International Wildlife, May-June, 2001 by Catherine Elton

As saddle-back tamarin monkeys leap across the trail in a steamy Peruvian jungle, biologist Jose "Pepe" Alvarez talks to a visitor, apparently oblivious to the cacophony of bird song in the background. Suddenly, he stops in mid sentence. "Did you hear that?" he asks, cocking his head slightly. Alvarez has isolated a single tune that, to untrained ears, is indistinguishable from the larger chorus. "That's Herpsilochmus gentryi," he announces.

Until a few years ago H. gentryi, the ancient antwren, was unknown to science. Then Alvarez, a budding naturalist who had come to Peru from Spain, discovered this four-inch-long, yellowish bird with black spots. It is just one of several new species he's found since 1995-most of them in this unlikely spot just a stone's throw from Iquitos, one of Amazonia's biggest cities, and all in a 142,000-acre stretch of forest he nearly single-handedly managed to protect.

All that alone would make Alvarez's story an unusual one. But there is a more complicated side to his commitment to a cause. At age 25, Alvarez came to Peru to devote his life to the Catholic Church. His mission was to spread the word of God to people living in the depths of the Amazon rain forest. Instead, Alvarez has become a biologist and conservation activist, a change of vocation he says is not as farfetched as it sounds. Helping people sustainably use and protect Amazonia's natural resources is much like missionary work, he explains. "I have merely changed the theme of my evangelization."

A tall man with striking, watery-blue eyes, reddish-brown hair and a beard, Alvarez arrived in the Amazon in 1983, filled with dreams of helping people live better in this life, not only in the afterlife. The young missionary spent much of his time traveling rivers by open boat to communities deep in the forest. There he would preach the Gospel to all who were interested and provide other services, ranging from baptisms and weddings to assistance in resolving community conflicts.

Yet even from the beginning, Alvarez's talks included at least hints about the need for rain-forest conservation. As a longtime lover of birds and wildlife, he had singled out the Amazon as his first choice for placement as a missionary. During his early years in Iquitos, he pursued this passion more formally, enrolling in the local university to earn a bachelor's degree in biology. Later, when he was posted deeper in the jungle, on the R'o Tigre, Alvarez began to spend most of his free time bird-watching. It was during this period that he discovered the ancient antwren, his first new species.

As the years passed, Alvarez's homilies began to include even more conservation content. At the same time, his youthful, idealistic dreams of affecting great change through evangelization were giving way to a feeling that his flock was growing "hard of hearing" to the Gospel. Alvarez began to see conservation as a cause where he could have a greater impact. Finally in 1996, he made what he calls "the most difficult decision of my life." After nearly 14 years, Alvarez left the Order of Saint Augustine to dedicate himself full time to biology and conservation.

If Alvarez was somewhat a conservationist while he was a missionary, he is still a preacher today. An excellent writer with sharp analytical skills, he is a frequent contributor to a variety of local publications. In addition, a gift for energetic and articulate speaking earns him many opportunities to participate in conferences and seminars, speak to communities and talk on the radio. Alvarez believes that his years as a missionary have provided a sense of "moral authority" that helps him spread his conservation message more powerfully.

He exhibits similar zeal when conducting scientific work. Based most of the time at the Institution for Research on the Peruvian Amazon in Iquitos, Alvarez has taken neither a vacation nor an entire day off (even on weekends) for the past two years. Every day that he can, the young biologist hops on his 19-year-old, red-and-chrome motorcycle and speeds into the nearby forest to search for new bird species.

Over the past five years, Alvarez has spent thousands of neck-breaking hours peering up through binoculars at the forest canopy, his head frequently surrounded by a cloud of mosquitoes. To attract a particular bird that he's heard before, but neither seen nor captured, he plays tapes of its songs that he's recorded previously.

Indeed, it is Alvarez's uncanny ability to identify birds by their songs that has been key to his finding new species-four so far with several more possibilities under investigation. "Vocalizations are how Pepe has found all his birds," says Bret Whitney, an ornithologist and research associate at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science. Without Alvarez's remarkable ear, most of these species would probably have remained undiscovered for many years. None of them are remarkable visually; all the birds are small-about the size of a house sparrow-and their coloring ranges from olive green to dull brown.