Wilder Yasuní

Although we have yet to introduce our Ecuadorian project in its full glamor, we are already busy with activities on the ground (see video below). This week our local team in Ecuador is working to remove an old barbed wire fence from the former cattle pastures found on our land.

The fence that once functioned to keep cattle inside the pastures has no use anymore and instead presents a barrier, restricting wildlife from moving freely through the landscape. Our hope is that removing the fence will help speed up the regeneration of rainforest on these pastures that are now dominated by non-native grasses because ground mammals such as agoutis, wild pigs and tapirs will be able to access these areas and disperse the seeds of native trees.

Overall, the team will remove over 1.5 km of fence, freeing up over 5 hectares of potential new habitat for local wildlife.

A series of Youtube videos introducing the context and plans for our work in Ecuador are in the making but in the meantime our local manager Fredy has made a short video explaining the most recent work on the ground!

Sharing exciting news from our Ecuadorian project! We are participating in the biggest citizen science event in birding: The Global Big Day. Organized by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, this event unites ornithologists and birding enthusiasts around the world in a single day to record the species in their areas and upload their observations to the e-Bird database.

We will host a group of local birding experts at our rainforest on the border of Yasuní National Park, who will be out all day recording species on our 194 ha property. Until now, we have already recorded almost 250 of the 596 bird species known to live in these forests and we are really excited to see how much higher this number could go after the count!

We will update you on the results next week or you can watch the results roll in on The Global Big Day on Saturday from 7pm ECT (Ecuador) time. Search for “Mangu Huasi (Mossy Earth) - Yasuni”.

And if you feel inspired you can join in too, it's actually very easy! You don't need to be a bird expert or go out all day. Even 30 minutes of recording could provide valuable data. Follow the instructions on e-Bird or watch the video below.

Last month we hosted 7 volunteer birders at our land in the Ecuadorian Amazon to record species for the Global Bid Day, the biggest single day citizen science birding event. The team recorded 99 species and although we had hoped for the number to be in the higher hundreds, it is still a respectable amount of species to see in one day.

The morning kicked off really well with 1 species recorded on average every two minutes, and this was just from walking the road around the house. Unfortunately, in the afternoon the weather was not on our side as heavy rain stopped the team from birding for several hours and they could only continue for a couple hours before sunset.

In the global ranking, Ecuador took 4th place in the number of recorded species (1,187) but it’s important to note that this was with less than a 10th of submitted checklists compared to the leading Colombia.

If you’re interested in finding out more check out the global results. Also, if you'd like to see the list of species recorded on our land, create an eBird account (here's a video to help) then access our list here.

We’d like to thank rangers from the Yasuní National Park, researchers from WCS, biology students Natalie and Cielo, Rodrigo, our local ornithology expert and guide at Mandari Panga Yasuni expeditions and members of the 12 de Febrero community don Gabriel and our neighbor don Jaime with his daughter who participated at the event.

We are thrilled to announce that we have completed the purchase of another bit of rainforest on the border of Yasuní national park!

The fund extra campaign

Thanks to the overwhelming support from our members who contributed to the fund extra campaign we raised enough funds to be able to purchase an additional 15 ha of rainforest bordering our land. This makes the total area of rainforest we now protect 209 hectares (516 acres)!

A potential release site for rescued wildlife

Two hundred hectares is already a sizable chunk of land on which we can protect wildlife and our idea is that as we continue to work with the communities bordering our land we will eventually use it as a safe release site for rehabilitated animals from a wildlife rescue center located in the main city of Coca. There are already a range of species living in our rainforest, including some permanent residents: a family of saki monkeys and nocturnal spix's monkeys, sloths and a male ocelot whose territory passes through our land.

The purchase process

The purchase process went smoothly as we knew the drill already from last year, when we purchased our first 194 ha property. After the admin and due diligence prepared by our lawyer, Fredy signed the contract on behalf of Mossy Earth at the notary in Coca and registered at the Municipality and Property Registry office by which the land purchase was officially completed.

Vlog tour of the land coming soon!

All the way from the Amazon we’d like to extend a big thank you for all your support and we’ll be sharing a short vlog tour of the new land with you shortly!

Check out our new vlog where Fredy walks you through what we've been up to in Ecuador over the past several weeks and introduces the exciting wildlife we spotted on our land!

As always, if you have any questions let us know in the comments below!

Check out our latest vlog to learn more about what we’ve been up to in Ecuador over the past two months! Take a peek into our new rainforest and join in for the Global Birding Day event we organized for schools from the neighbouring communities.

We ended the month with some more upsetting news as the old pastures on our land caught on fire caused by a fallen electric pole. Luckily, no one was hurt, the house is still standing and the forests did not suffer any damage.

We’ll bring you more information and context about each of the events over the coming weeks!

Last month, we took part in another Global Big Day - a day of participatory science that unites birdwatchers around the world for a shared goal: recording the diversity of birds in 24 hours.

This time we wanted to involve the children from the area so leading up to the Global Big Day we organized a two-day event with activities about birds and nature and invited elementary schools from the neighbouring communities. The activities were led by volunteer birdwatchers and educators from association PAU (Programa Aves Urbanos), some of whom travelled to the Amazon for over 14 hours all the way from coastal Guayaquil. For coming all this way to share their knowledge and passion, we’d like to extend a massive thank you!

The start of something bigger

Our house was full to the brim as we welcomed over 70 people from communities 12 de Febrero and Mandaripanga, mostly pupils from two local elementary schools, their teachers and a few parents. We learned about bird anatomy, their behaviour and the different adaptations and got creative crafting binoculars from recycled materials and making bird masks. This event marked the first in a series of educational activities for children and youth that we're setting up as part of our project in Ecuador and are thrilled at the positive feedback from the participants!

Support Young Birdwatchers of Yasuní through Fund Extra

The success of this community birding event gave us the confidence that our idea to start a birdwatching club is really worthwhile. We're now raising funds to run the club over the coming year.

If you’d like to support this activity, you can do so in the fund extra section of your account!

17 bird species recorded on our new 15 ha land

Following the two-day community event, the volunteers from PAU accompanied by local guides and ornithologists participated in the Global Bird Day, recording bird observations on our land and around Mandaripanga. Those with an eBird account can see the complete list of 105 species on our latest checklists from the 12th of October.

The team also explored our new 15 ha rainforest we purchased back in September. In just a couple of hours, they recorded 17 species of birds!

There's lots to tell you about from our first community event at our project base in Yasuní, where we invited schools and members from neighbouring communities to a two-day birding extravaganza celebrating the Global Big Day of birding.

We used the event to train local women in cooking for groups of visitors with the idea we can provide employment as we host volunteers and start running our new rainforest tour next year. Five women from community 12 de Febrero expressed interest and joined for three days cooking under the guidance of two professional chefs. Eric Condo who works in different lodges in the Amazon and doña Meche who works at an all-female run restaurant in the city of Coca specialising in local cuisine. Katy Balladares, the co-founder of a tourism enterprise from the neighbouring Mandaripanga community and doña Marie, who works for Mandari tours and is responsible for housekeeping, also joined to share their knowledge.

Together they prepared food and refreshments for over 70 participants over 3 days.What a way to jump into the world of cooks and chefs! We're planning to organise more training where the women will continue learning to prepare different meals from local ingredients, including vegetarian and vegan options. We hope that over time we'll be able to provide a steady income source for these neighbouring families through ecotourism and hosting volunteers, research groups and universities on our land.

If you’ve dreamt of visiting the Amazon or are keen to visit our project specifically, you’ll soon have a chance to do so by coming on our new tour! Watch this space, we’ll let you know when bookings open!

The weekend following our community birding event, we had some distressing news come from Fredy in Ecuador as several hectares of old pastures on our land burned down in a fire caused by a fallen power line.

We're thankful to our neighbour Jaime who was the first one to spot the fire and together with other people from the community and guards from the national park, they made sure it didn't reach the house. The flames were several meters high as they consumed the tall introduced pasture grasses (often grasses native to Africa) fuelled by the wind on these open areas.Luckily the fire didn't spread into the rainforest, perhaps protected by its more humid microclimate.

The knock-on effect of deforestation

This event truly highlights the problems caused by deforestation and introducing exotic grasses for livestock grazing to the Amazon. The negative effect of forest clearing extends far beyond the immediately deforested areas in a phenomenon known as the "edge effect."

The edge effect of deforestation refers to changes in environmental conditions and biodiversity on the forest edges and extending deep into the surrounding forest areas. Combined with forest fragmentation, edge effects are one of the most deleterious processes threatening tropical forests today.

The key impacts

Deforestation impacts the microclimate of the surrounding forests, making forest edges along the created sites warmer, drier and more windy. Forest edges often favour species adapted to open or disturbed areas, leading to a shift in species composition and aiding colonisation by invasive species. These effects can extend several kilometres (1km-10km) into the intact forest areas. Even to the untrained eye of our team from Europe, the difference in humidity, temperature and plant composition between the forest on our land compared to the one in the national park was obvious as we walked these forests.

The shift in microclimate and exposure to wind makes the fragmented forest more susceptible to both fire and soil degradation and increases the mortality of large trees. This wildfire susceptibility is especially troubling as the region grapples with record dry conditions troubling much of South America over the past two years.

Speeding up rainforest recovery

The fire on our land truly brought the twin problems of deforestation and climate change to our doorstep. Our attention over the coming months will be on setting up and testing interventions to push back the pasture grasses and speed up rainforest recovery on these abandoned pastures. Drawing from experience in tropical rainforest restoration in other parts of South America, we're looking into testing and comparing assisted natural regeneration techniques and a method called tree islands developed in Costa Rica, in which trees are planted in clusters to mimic the natural process of succession and accelerate the recovery of the forest habitat. Our hope is that the lessons learned from this process could later be replicated in the region as, to our knowledge, there aren’t any studies on this topic done in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

We’ll bring you more updates as we deep dive into the research and consult experts to determine the best approach for our land!

Have you ever wondered how researchers study life in tree canopies? Watch our new vlog below, where Ollie (our canopy rope access expert from Ropey Science) walks you through the process as we install the very first canopy camera trap in our rainforest to take a peek into the hustle and bustle of canopy highways!

Plus a new video on our main YouTube channel

We went up a lot of trees and got bitten by a lot of bees during our time in the Amazon! All of this was done so we could start building a picture of the species who live in our rainforest. In this new video on our main channel, we tell you everything that we've learnt about this elusive canopy world and introduce two projects in the making to help protect and restore this unique ecosystem. 

I hope you enjoy this double delivery of new videos! As always, if you’re curious about anything specific, leave a comment below.

In this wildlife-packed vlog, we’re bringing you footage from the exciting release of two boa constrictors and three land tortoises on our land and look into what species use the new 15 ha of rainforest that we purchased last year.

We also update you on the state of the burnt pastures and our next plans with this grass dominated area!

Earlier this month, our first pair of volunteers, Ben and Morgan, arrived at our Yasuní Rainforest project in the Ecuadorian Amazon. They will spend five months with us running an education programme focused on teaching English and organising an environmental club for local children. They were warmly welcomed by community members, some of whom are eagerly waiting to join the classes which will start shortly. Here's a bit about our new volunteers and what they expect from this experience:

Hello! My name's Morgan and I am one half of the new Mossy Earth volunteers freshly arrived in the Yasuní Rainforest. I’m born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, but have spent the last 3 years studying my bachelors in Global Development in Southern Norway (I will in fact be writing my thesis from here in the rainforest). Ecuador will be my 4th country I’ve lived abroad in, and this will be my second stint teaching English. Although I grew up in the city, I’ve come to learn that I feel most at peace when living close to nature, be it temperate or tropical forests. When I’m not country hopping or skipping through the forests, you’ll usually find me dancing to good music or cooking delicious food, often at the same time :)

I'm most looking forward to becoming more acquainted with the community of 12 de Febrero and to start teaching our English classes, both of which will transpire in the coming days. Amongst all the fun and exciting new things, I think I'll also appreciate becoming a bit more settled in this new community and having a regular routine with our classes. Special thank you to Fredy and everyone in and around the Mossy Earth basecamp here in Yasuní for being so warm and welcoming to us, it's really helped us feel comfortable in this new environment. 

Hey, I'm Ben and I'm the other volunteer here on Mossy Earth's land in Ecuador! I come from Cornwall, which is the most south-western region of England and in my opinion the most beautiful too. Despite being a recent graduate with a degree including Spanish and Portuguese, my day to day language skills are revealing themselves to be very rusty. Having grown up on nature shows like Deadly-60 and everything David Attenborough, I'm so happy to have such an opportunity to get to know the flora and fauna of this region. It'll also be great to spend time with Morgan, Adriana, Fredy and my new tarantula flatmate. The people here have been so friendly and welcoming so I hope my time here has a positive impact not just on the project, but on the local community too.

Morgan and Ben are settling into life in the jungle well and are keen to keep us updated throughout the next few months!

I invite you to watch our latest field notes video that documents the preparations to kick-off our educational programme. We've been busy building our new meeting space to host English lessons and we now run 100% on solar energy! We also supported the clean up of river Tiputini that borders our land and had an unexpected visitor at the volunteer house 🐍

Since this footage was taken, we've welcomed our new volunteers and started giving English classes in the community. It's been great so far and we can't wait to tell you all about it in the next update! Stay tuned...

It's been a couple of months since our volunteers Ben and Morgan arrived at our project base in the Amazon to teach English at the communities.

✍️ In our latest vlog from Ecuador we go into detail on how we went about setting up the English classes, the reasoning behind this effort and some of the challenges along the way.

With the rise in remote working opportunities and ecotourism, speaking English can be an important step for local people living in biodiversity hotspots to make a living without selling their land and moving away - not only helping to preserve their way of life, but helping to protect the rainforest land that they’ve lived on for generations too.

💬 You can also join Ben and Morgan in learning some Kichwa vocabulary!

I hope you enjoy the update and as always you can leave any questions for us or for our volunteers in the comments below!

Big things are happening on our small rainforest reserve in the Amazon! Over the past two months, we’ve been busy working to both restore the rainforest and improve its connectivity so canopy-dwelling animals can move through the forest easier and more safely. 

We will dive deeper into both projects in upcoming Field Reports but for now, we wanted to share the🎉 camera trap footage of the first crossing!

The first one to use the bridge was a kinkajou, a curious arboreal mammal related to racoons and we were thrilled to see it cross just one month after installation. You can watch the kinkajou first getting familiar with the new bridge and crossing later in the video below. This is a promising sign that more animals will follow, sloths, tamanaduas and at least seven species of monkeys that we’ve observed on our land.

Keep your fingers crossed and we’ll bring you the news as the updates come in from our canopy camera traps!

We're happy to share some exciting news—we filmed our first jaguar passing through our land! The jaguar was walking on a footpath just 10-minute walk from our base. The lucky footage was filmed by our volunteer Ben, following a possible night encounter with the big cat days earlier.

"The reason I'd placed the camera trap there was because I went for a night walk to photograph bats. I was about 50 metres into the jungle when I heard a thumping noise just up ahead. I shone the torch into the forest and saw two big orange eyes. It watched me for about ten seconds and then vanished in silence. The next morning, I set up a camera trap to try and capture whatever it was, and couple weeks later the jaguar was there."

We’ve recently had a large group of peccaries (wild pigs) show up at the front of our house, and we've filmed many pacas and agoutis on camera traps placed around our reserve. The presence of these ground-dwelling mammals is a good indicator that this area could support top predators, including jaguars, so we’re very happy to finally have this confirmed! It’s a huge boost of motivation for our whole team to continue working towards safeguarding the future of this precious rainforest!

We’re not 100% sure if it’s a male or a female so let us know your guess in the comments below!

Our Tree Island experiment is well underway on our land in the Amazon. Check out this latest on-the-ground vlog to see how we're trying to turn old pastures back into rainforest habitat.

More news also comes from our Birdwatching club as it entered its fourth month of weekly classes in two communities living on the border of the National Park.

🦜 The eBird app

Earlier this month, we held a three-day workshop focused on the use of the eBird app, a free online tool to track observations of bird sightings while making data openly available for scientific research. The workshop was led by Juan Francisco, a young bird enthusiast and biology student, who's been trained by the Merlin Lab to work with eBird. We spent the first day learning about the functionalities of the app and two days in the field recording observations with our Birdwatching club.

📝 A resource for young learners

The app is used by thousands of professional and lay birdwatchers around the world and it is a great education tool that we will integrate in our Birdwatching club. It will help our young birdwatchers to access more learning resources and log their observations in checklists in one place. It will also help us collect all observations in one place and put the Tiputini area of Yasuní National Park on the map as a birdwatching hotspot, helping us in our efforts to promote the ecotourism potential of this region.

🏅 Inspiring more birdwatchers

While we’ve been experiencing some challenges with getting continuous attendance at the Birdwatching club, there are several people in each community that come regularly and a few that are showing talent and potential in birding. In a couple months, we're planning to organise a birding competition with some nice prizes to motivate more young people from the communities to attend the club.

💚 Fund future forest guardians

We'd also like to say a big thank you to everyone who has supported our Birdwatching club via the fund extra campaign, we’ve raised over £3,500 helping to cover 40% of this year's expenses!

If you’d like to support this campaign, you can still do so in the Fund Extra tab of your account 🙏🏼

Here's a new Field Notes update from our project in the Amazon building tree canopy bridges.

In this short update, Adriana explains more about the problems we're trying to address with arboreal animals and dangerous road crossings. You will also hear more about the bridge designs, why we chose them and how we went about building them.

See how, as a Mossy Earth member, you're helping us test this intervention to reconnect rainforest habitat!