Lasting Stewardship for Bird Reserves

Anyone who owns a home knows that upkeep is required — from routine cleaning tasks to occasional calls to an electrician, plumber, or other pro for more involved jobs. The same principle holds true for nature reserves. Once land is established as a reserve, it needs stewardship support for staffing, habitat management, infrastructure, and the like.

The alternative is neglect. After all, insufficient planning and shortages of capacity and resources available to the organization managing a protected area can cause it to fail.

ABC and our partners have been in the reserve business for more than a quarter century: Reserves are the first line of defense against bird extinctions, and they provide crucial refuges for both migratory and resident bird species, as well as scores of insects, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and plants. Before my retirement, I was involved with many land protection actions at ABC, and it’s one of the truly energizing parts of conservation work. With each piece of land conserved, it’s tempting to pump your fist and exclaim, “we did it!” And I assure you, we did — many times.

In fact, we celebrated “victory” with our partners on more than 600 tracts of land at 120 protected areas spanning over 1,140,000 acres in 14 Latin American countries. We accomplished this by working with 55 partners to buy land, secure easements and concessions, create community reserves and regional protected areas, and more. The majority of the reserves are owned and managed by in-country nongovernmental conservation organizations (NGOs), though some are community or publicly owned.

Then came the work to manage the reserves — to ensure that the lands we helped to protect actually work to prevent bird extinctions and maintain healthy populations. ABC has long believed that building capacity in the conservation movement is the foundation on which successful conservation is built, and we knew that new reserves would need ongoing management support.

So, as our land protection work gained steam starting in 2004, we looked for support to increase reserve sustainability in tandem with fundraising for land purchase. We found enlightened donors who understood the need for longer-term support for our partners. However, it was a constant struggle to keep this funding flowing, as many awards were one-year grants or from foundations that directed limited funding to new applicants, changed their priorities, or disappeared altogether.

A deeper problem also arose: While protecting land is easy to understand and attractive for donors, many of the activities needed to sustain reserves and their NGO stewards often are not. The pool of funders interested in supporting basic needs, like computer backup systems, training in fundraising, or support for websites or vehicles, is exceedingly small.

And sometimes the needs may be ones that partner organizations are reluctant to admit they have — such as financial and human resource training to prepare financial reports, budgets, forecasts and cashflow projections, job descriptions, and performance reviews. Even stickier, an organization may be facing issues that they fear could scare off donors, including governance challenges, budget deficits, and delegating roles and distributing responsibility from founding leaders to new staff as organizations grow and mature. Yet, meeting all of these needs is essential for organizations — and their work — to succeed. Leaving these obligations unmet means putting our reserves at risk.

By 2014, we knew we required a program that would deliver more consistent technical support and resources to ABC partners. Thankfully, that need aligned with the goals of March Conservation Fund (MCF), a San Francisco-based foundation that supports land conservation and stewardship, research, and education. A year later, ABC and MCF launched the Latin American Reserve Stewardship Initiative (LARSI). Now, a decade later, LARSI has provided grants totaling more than $3.8 million in support of 29 conservation NGOs working to protect more than 70 reserves in 13 countries. The following case studies illustrate the wide variety of activities supported by LARSI as well as its reach and impact.

In 2005, Asociación Ecosistemas Andinos (ECOAN) and ABC embarked on an ambitious plan to protect pristine forests bordering the 450,000-acre Bosque de Protección Alto Mayo in northern Peru. This effort would provide a barrier to agricultural expansion from the west in the already-threatened protected area and conserve habitat for the amazing Long-whiskered Owlet (listed as Endangered at the time, since downlisted to Vulnerable to extinction) and over 560 additional bird species.

It was a huge leap for ECOAN, whose activities at the time were concentrated in the Vilcanota range of the Andes near Cusco in southern Peru. Ultimately, with ABC support, the group purchased 42 properties to create the Área de Conservación Privada Abra Patricia-Alto Nieva (Abra Patricia) spanning 8,226 acres and securing a conservation concession (akin to a longterm lease) from the Peruvian government for another 16,557 acres. In addition, ECOAN and ABC secured a 95-acre easement on an important tract of land (Huembo) for the spectacular Marvelous Spatuletail hummingbird in the nearby town of Pomacochas.

At both sites, ECOAN constructed ecotourism lodges for visiting birders and other naturalists to generate income at the reserves. While ABC secured grants to buy land, build lodges, and hire staff, LARSI provided support over eight years, from 2015 to 2022, for an array of activities that put the reserves and ECOAN on firmer footing. LARSI contributed to lodge and kitchen upgrades, installation of solar panels and a septic system, and needed maintenance.

Importantly, LARSI supported salaries for staff at Abra Patricia and Huembo during the COVID-19 pandemic. LARSI provided similar support during the pandemic to other conservation NGOs.

“LARSI’s support marked a turning point in ECOAN’s history,” said Adrian Torres, ECOAN’s Director of Conservation and Development, whose position was also launched with LARSI support. “It wasn’t just a series of grants — it was a lifeline that arrived at a moment of immense challenge and transformation. From 2015 to 2022, LARSI accompanied us through critical stages of growth, helping us strengthen our flagship reserves — Abra Patricia and Huembo — and elevate them to internationally recognized birding destinations. With LARSI support, we improved infrastructure and services, promoted these sites at international birding fairs, and increased our visibility in the global ecotourism community.”

“The systems, capacity, and resilience we developed thanks to LARSI have shaped the organization we are today,” added Constantino Aucca Chutas, ECOAN’s President. “It was more than financial support — it was trust, vision, and partnership. We carry that legacy forward in every step we take to protect Andean forests and empower local communities.”

In 2008, ABC began working with Asociación Armonía to develop the Reserva Barba Azul to protect an important nonbreeding area for the Critically Endangered Blue-throated Macaw in the Beni Savanna of northern Bolivia. Known also as the Llanos de Moxos, the area was extensively farmed in pre-Columbian times with raised fields, causeways, canals, and thousands of forested mounds. While nearly all signs of this occupation are gone, the “tree islands” remain, and their motacú palms provide important macaw roosting and feeding areas.

ABC and other organizations supported the purchase of more than 26,000 acres of a former cattle ranch to create the reserve and construct a manager’s house and a basic field station for visiting researchers. Bolivian law sets a minimum required level of agriculture that must be conducted on private reserves, which forced Armonía to develop a plan for cattle ranching that would fulfill the legal requirement while not undermining the original conservation objectives. This turned out to be fortuitous in a way: If the group could master a low-impact method of cattle grazing that was less reliant on destructive burning on a portion of the reserve, it could potentially pay for reserve operations.

To fulfill this plan, LARSI supported Armonía for seven years, concluding in 2021 (before the organization returned to LARSI in 2025 for other needs). LARSI helped Armonía lay the groundwork for the cattle program with the development of an organizational strategic plan, a communications strategy, and a conservation plan for Barba Azul with an integrated “Eco-friendly Cattle Business Model.”

The Cantão ecoregion in east-central Brazil is where Instituto Araguaia, ABC, and others have worked to protect Araguaia’s 1,482-acre Cantão-Cerrado Corridor, which lies in the eastern buffer zone of Parque Estadual do Cantão. The corridor encompasses the last remaining intact lowland cerrado forests in the region, preventing them from being converted to soybean agriculture. The reserves within the corridor, known as Guaíra, Lago do Campo, and Canto do Obrieni, are the only strictly protected areas in the entire, vast lowland cerrado, but their protection requires constant vigilance by Araguaia in the face of recreational hunters, armed gangs of fish poachers, and, above all, the constant threat of fire. This is the land of the Vulnerable Kaempfer’s Woodpecker, which is declining throughout its small, fragmented range.

LARSI’s support of Araguaia began in 2021 and is now in its fifth year. Araguaia has used most of its funding for basic reserve needs (including guard salaries, patrols, and vehicle and other facilities maintenance), construction of a visitor center in the town of Caseara, an exchange trip during which Araguaia personnel visited other ABC-partner reserves, and development of ecotourism. However, LARSI support for fire management and prevention has arguably been the most dramatically impactful in terms of protecting the reserves.

All fires that occur in this region are set by people, either accidentally or intentionally. During 2021 and 2022, Araguaia personnel created miles of fire breaks and conducted controlled burns, work that is a year-round commitment in the face of ever-worsening fire seasons. Also in 2022, PrevFogo, the firefighting agency for Brazil’s federal protected areas, prepared fire management plans for each of Araguaia’s reserves — work that LARSI funded.

In June 2022, Araguaia’s LARSI-supported fire preparation was put to the test with a fire that threatened the Canto do Obrieni Reserve and took the team three days to put out. On August 28, a fire started at a ranch bordering the Guaíra Reserve, and two days later, another fire moved into the area between Guaíra and Canto do Obrieni. Araguaia fought these fires continuously day and night for the next 12 days, until, with help from local ranchers, the Caseara municipal fire brigade, and PrevFogo, they were finally extinguished.

Following firefighting training from PrevFogo in 2023, Araguaia was again challenged in 2024, the worst year for fires in Brazil’s history. In August, Araguaia staff courageously fought and contained fires that repeatedly threatened the Guaíra Reserve, and again in September they confronted a large fire that came perilously close to the Lago de Campo Reserve.

Araguaia has not lost any reserve land to fire, thanks to support from LARSI for fire prevention and control. This is vitally important for Kaempfer’s Woodpecker, a bird that depends on tall dead nesting trees that would certainly be eliminated by fire in the cerrado forest. Doubly bad would be the loss of bamboo thickets upon which the woodpecker relies almost exclusively to forage for ant larvae.

As Araguaia’s leaders, Silvana Campello and George Georgiadis, explained: “With repeated uncontrolled fires sweeping through the entire cerrado region, such species will only survive in refuges where fires are kept out. This requires not large projects with an expiration date but moderate and reliable support, year after year, that enables an experienced and committed team to be built and maintained, fighting fires year after year for as long as there is no one else to do it. This is exactly the kind of support that LARSI has given Instituto Araguaia.”

A driving force behind LARSI is Ivan Samuels, MCF’s Executive Director. In 2014, Samuels had been on the board of Fundación de Conservación Jocotoco, one of ABC’s long-time partners in Ecuador, for six years. MCF had supported a range of needs at Jocotoco, from land purchases to core operations, and he noticed that many donors would support key land acquisitions but then move on, as if the work was done, when in fact it had just begun.

Knowing from his Jocotoco board experience what was involved in stewarding the land once acquired, Samuels worried that many NGOs in Latin America did not have the tools and resources to ensure long-term protection for their reserve networks. “We were already donors to ABC,” said Samuels. “I had a publication from ABC called the Latin American Bird Reserve Network, profiling the conservation investments ABC had made with many organizations across the region. That was the spark. I realized the network was a platform from which we could deploy resources across the NGO landscape to help partners in Latin America become more sustainable, adopt better financial controls and governance practices, and ultimately better manage their growing reserve networks. ABC was the ideal organization to implement such a program because they already had established relationships with these partners.”

The LARSI program follows a re-granting model: MCF provides funding to ABC. ABC requests proposals from partner organizations in which the partners identify strategies and actions to make their organizations and reserves more secure. ABC then enters into direct agreements with 10 or more partners each year to help partners address their needs.

It’s a powerful multiplier for MCF, allowing it to support more organizations than it could on its own while taking advantage of ABC’s ability to work one-on-one with each grantee, often matching with additional funds raised from other sources for specific projects. For ABC, it provides a steady stream of support for a wide variety of partners, and partners often stay in the program for multiple years, giving them the ability to address complex problems or develop programs in phases until they reach fruition.

Partners that leave the program after one or more years of support can return to LARSI to address new challenges. Said Amy Upgren, ABC’s Director of International Programs and LARSI program coordinator, “We’ve had partners receive LARSI funding for up to 10 consecutive years, and, at any given time, we have up to 14 partners working on their own specific projects in support of reserves that we have invested in. Working with so many partners on many different issues at once is amazingly powerful and rewarding.”

Upgren added, “Another important role that ABC fills in the LARSI program is that of facilitating connections between partners, especially those facing similar challenges. We have funded partner visits to other LARSI-supported reserves, which have led to idea exchanges across partners and countries,” noting that ABC hosted a partner summit in 2019 in Virginia and August of 2025 in Colombia.

The wide variety of projects, personnel, and challenges that have been addressed with LARSI support is a testament to the complexity of protecting land for threatened bird species and other wildlife. “We fund things that are hard to fundraise for,” said MCF’s Samuels, “things that other donors may not find exciting. But through critical thinking with our partners, these investments can jumpstart whole new opportunities in fundraising, ecotourism, or communications. It’s rewarding when we help fund a new position and that person becomes a critical part of their team, leveraging new sources of support, bringing in new partners, and effectively making their organizations more sustainable. Sometimes it takes years for the full impact to be realized, but we’ve paved the way for success.”

Daniel Lebbin, ABC’s Vice President for Threatened Species, added: “LARSI represents the best kind of collaboration in fundraising and conservation. We are more confident in creating new reserves, knowing we have the potential of LARSI support for those areas in their early years and for local conservation groups to lead this global effort in their countries. We are grateful to March Conservation Fund for the partnership, and we look forward to continuing to foster lasting conservation results together.”

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of Bird Conservation, the Member magazine of American Bird Conservancy. Learn more about the benefits of becoming an ABC Member and join today.