Jose Miranda is owner of Albergue el Socorro, a combination lodge, preserve and birding hot spot.
I’m sipping my third cup of coffee in the open-air dining room at the Albergue el Socorro private nature preserve and inn high in the mountains of Costa Rica following the most intense hour of bird watching in my life.
From brightly colored tanagers and flitting little warblers to the big-beaked toucans, all varieties of feathered wildlife put on a spectacular sunrise show in the yard of the family-run business. I’m just a casual birder, but I know enough to realize this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
After our breakfast of scrambled eggs, black beans and homemade breads, Albergue el Socorro owner José Miranda explains how the 400-acre preserve is part of the 18-site Costa Rican Bird Route aimed at bringing more visitors to this Central American nation of 4.75 million. The inns and accompanying tourist dollars help fund these private preserves.
The hope is that emphasizing tourism over extractive industries like farming, mining or forestry will slow destruction of the rainforest.
Miranda hands me a guidebook to the various private reserves along the route. I start flipping through it, when I notice the address of the publisher: 7 N. Pinckney St. in Madison, Wis.
Talk about stumbling onto a local story. It turns out the Costa Rican Bird Route is a project of the Rainforest Biodiversity Group, an effort launched over a decade ago by Andrew Rothman, a 1995 graduate of Madison East High School. Rothman fell in love with Costa Rica on a college trip while at UW-Stevens Point.
After that life-changing journey, Rothman switched his major to natural resources protection and has now devoted his career to helping endangered species. He’s returned to Costa Rica many times and continues to champion ecotourism.
Rothman’s career has since taken him to Washington, D.C., where he serves as migratory bird program director at the American Bird Conservancy. The Rainforest Biodiversity Group is still headquartered in Madison and has just completed another round of small grants awarded to those working on habitat preservation.
Saving rainforests in Costa Rica also benefits birds in the U.S., since many of our brightly colored common summer visitors like the Baltimore oriole or scarlet tanager migrate south in winter to Central America.
“When the birds are doing well in Costa Rica, it usually means they are doing well here too,” says Dan Schneider, a planner with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the longest-serving board member of the Rainforest Biodiversity Group.
For years, tourism in Central America was slow to develop because of civil wars in various regions and the lack of convenient airline connections. But as peace has settled over more of the region, the number of visitors to Costa Rica has skyrocketed.
Costa Rica is a leader in Latin American ecotourism, with nearly 25% of its land under some sort of protected status. Today, tourism accounts for over 5% of the country’s gross domestic product and brings in more foreign dollars than bananas, pineapples and coffee exports combined.
In 2012, according to the most recent figures available, Costa Rica counted 2.34 million foreign visitors, with spending reaching $2.4 billion in U.S. dollars. Nearly half of visitors come from the U.S., with Canada contributing another 10%.
“We’ve had a lot of people from Wisconsin come stay with us,” says Albergue el Socorro owner Miranda, who with his wife converted most of his family’s small dairy farm to a tourist destination a decade ago. “My brother still milks a few cows, but farming is harder work than giving tours,” Miranda jokes through a translator.
During our stay last April, Miranda guided us down a narrow rocky path to a rushing mountain stream that demanded we pull off the hiking boots and cool our feet in the bubbling water. The trail out of the gorge wasn’t easy and by the looks of it was traveled more frequently by tapirs, a large, pig-like mammal, than adventure-seeking tourists. On the steepest section, Miranda had left a braided nylon climbing rope we used to pull ourselves up the muddy slope.
Set on 400 acres two hours north of the capital city of San José, the Albergue el Socorro is one of the more remote preserves on the Costa Rican Bird Route. The drive there alone is spectacular and not for those without GPS — although cell phone service was good enough that I watched one of the UW basketball NCAA tournament games on my iPhone.
During our three-week journey around Costa Rica, we weren’t lucky enough to glimpse the endangered great green macaw — one of the most coveted species for birders visiting Central America. But we did get a lengthy viewing of the beautiful long-tailed quetzal during a guided trip to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, a mountainous area settled in the 1950s by Quakers from the U.S. drawn to Costa Rica by the fact it had disbanded its standing army and was a pacifist nation.
Sometimes described as the “Switzerland of Latin America,” Costa Rica remains one of the most affluent and stable nations in a region long ravaged by poverty and conflict. It boasts universal health care, a per capita gross domestic product of more than $10,000, a literacy rate of 95% and female life expectancy of 80 years.
“Costa Rica offers a look at a way of life distinct from the modernized world, while allowing tourists to largely avoid the sad realities of poverty in the Third World,” writes Julie Dasenbrock in her 2013 report “The Pros and Cons of Ecotourism in Costa Rica.” Tourism has also come under fire from those who argue it has stymied indigenous economic development and left the nation at the mercy of visitors.
Rainforest Biodiversity Group board member Schneider is aware of those criticisms but maintains that ecotourism provides a more sustainable model than clearcutting rainforests in the name of economic development: “Every acre that is preserved for visitors is an acre of rainforest that isn’t being destroyed.”