HAVEN – WILDLIFE UNDER SIEGE IN BOLIVIA

Raphaël worked as a wildlife protection volunteer at Ambue Ari for six weeks in September 2017. Here he charts the time he spent there, and what he learned.

In a region of rural Bolivia devastated by logging and forest fires set by cattle ranchers, Ambue Ari wildlife sanctuary serves as the last safe haven for wild and captive animals alike. Ambue Ari is located on the site of an abandoned cacao plantation, re-wilded to lush secondary rainforest. Today, it teems with wildlife seeking refuge from habitat destruction and poaching. To continue the sanctuary’s mission of protecting Bolivian wildlife, workers have their sights set on a new project running in tandem with the animal sanctuary: sustainable agroforestry, harvesting the abundant feral cacao to produce chocolate.

The sanctuary is run by the Bolivian NGO comunidad Inti Wara Yassi. It’s lost in the jungle, and stays off the map for a reason: its inhabitants are vulnerable wildlife which can fetch a high price on the black market. Here, workers and volunteers from Bolivia and abroad take in and care for victims of the illegal wildlife trade, and release them into the area’s protected land where possible – though their trauma means most are not so lucky. Most of the animals housed here, from parrots to monkeys and jaguars, have been rescued from exotic pet-keepers, zoos with inadequate facilities, wildlife dealers, or poachers.

But after a drop in the numbers of foreigners visiting Bolivia, Ambue Ari is falling short on volunteer workhands. How will they find the manpower and funding needed to look after their animals?

ASCENSION DE GUARAYOS, NORTH-EASTERN BOLIVIA

Driving through this landscape, what I see is cogs turning in a war machine. A war is raging all around this country, this continent, this world. A war between civilisation and nature, between man and beast. Here, the front lines are marked by smoke, or an orange glow in the night. The jungle is burning, making way for cattle pastures and orderly rows of crops. In the logging camps, the green is being eaten away by the brown of felled logs and a haze of sawdust. The sun shines not on leaves, but on the dull metal glint of battered machinery.  Everywhere you look, old-growth trees are falling in the name of money.

But in the midst of all this loss, there is a place where the wild is winning: a lost patch of jungle that has stood strong for over two decades. A fortress where wildlife is safe from the hunter’s gun, the farmer’s fires and the logger’s chainsaw. Here, on an abandoned cacao plantation, the forest has reclaimed the land and animals have returned in astonishing numbers.

On the road cutting through the sanctuary, trucks rattle past loaded with huge tree trunks several metres in diameter, cut from old growth forest in one of the region’s many logging concessions.

In Ambue Ari, cacao farming has been consumed over the years by the green of the jungle, and the trees creep their way back to the sky. Many have already grown great and strong, their 30-metre canopies trailing thick masses of gnarled vines.

In the market of Ascension de Guarayos, armadillo is sold openly, sawn in half down the middle and grilled for meals in the food court by the bus station.

In Ambue Ari, I crouch in silence and watch an armadillo loudly snuffling its way through the leaf litter. Oblivious to my presence due to its poor eyesight, it meanders within a metre of me, before rushing away suddenly when I shift my foot and the leaves rustle. In a year of working in Neotropical forests, I’ve only ever seen two armadillos before Ambue Ari. But here, it’s the fifth one I’ve seen this week. Even though the area of forest AA covers is relatively small, I have never seen such a high density of animals before, and it begs to be studied as a refuge zone. Around every corner, parrots, squirrel monkeys, macaws or peccary can suddenly appear from the undergrowth in large groups.

In Bolivian rural communities, infiltrating Chinese interests have recently been exposed to be contributing to a rise in poaching of wild jaguars (link). Their teeth are said to be worth more by weight than cocaine in some countries, and have been discovered and confiscated in mail shipments headed for Southeast Asia.

In Ambue Ari, Research Coordinator Ollie’s camera traps have been picking up wild cats in the area, part of his research into the last remaining fragments of the nearby Panthera jaguar corridor initiative. He’s naming each new identified jaguar after Game of Thrones characters. Over breakfast anuncios (announcements) one morning, he shows us photos of Arya walking down a fire trail at night with a young cub – named Hot Pie. The camera trap images have provided proof that the cats are breeding, and are now raising young, on the sanctuary’s grounds.

Ambue Ari’s purpose, however, is to care for the casualties of war: it’s a sanctuary for animals rescued from the illegal wildlife trade. It’s run by Bolivian NGO Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi (CIWY) – meaning community of the sun, stars, and moon in Spanish and three local indigenous languages. CIWY’s three centres across Bolivia take in anything from parrots and coatis to jaguars and tapirs, with specialties in caring for monkeys and wild cats. Some were caught being trafficked across borders. Many were confiscated by the authorities when they were discovered being kept illegally as exotic pets. In other cases, they were surrendered by owners who realise they cannot handle or properly care for a wild animal as a household pet. Others are even from zoos and circuses in Bolivia that couldn’t provide them with adequate welfare standards. The problem is so dire and widespread that CIWY are no longer able to take in any more animals due to lack of space.

Development is occurring to make space more animals at CIWY’s newest centre, Jacj Cuisij (“land of dreams” in two local tongues), which currently houses three pumas. Their biggest centre, Machia, houses over 350 animals, specialising in bird and monkey rehabilitation.

Throughout South America, monkeys sit in cages, often malnourished when kept illegally as pets. They’re often taught tricks or made to wear clothes, and accumulate behavioural abnormalities over time that make it harder for them to be rehabilitated.

In Ambue Ari, rescued juvenile red howler monkey Beyonce is learning to climb trees, use her tail to grip branches, and eat leaves like her wild counterparts. “She’s making progress,” a new volunteer assigned to work with her tells me from fifteen metres up in the canopy. If all goes well, Beyo can be integrated with the rest of the howler ‘Squad’ – and the five of them have a chance at being released back into the wild together. They would join several other troops resident in the area who were successfully released by Ambue Ari’s rehabilitation projects.

But despite CIWY’s noble goals, much of the work at Ambue Ari happens under a shroud of secrecy. The animals CIWY’s centres house are most often there because of the value they have on the black market. If knowledge of what and where they are falls into the wrong hands, they could be stolen all over again. Jaguar teeth, for example, have been estimated to be worth over USD $200 per canine when sold to Chinese exporters.

Here at Ambue Ari, a group of staff and volunteers operate out of a central camp. Every day they slip out into the jungle, carrying food, water and enrichment material  (fresh branches, food-filled packages or toys made from natural materials) to the animals in their care. Most enclosures are isolated from the others, hidden in a spider-web maze of narrow trails snaking through the forest. No detailed or accurate maps are available to volunteers, and most only know the paths to the animals they work with, having been shown the way by their predecessor during their training. When entering these trails from the road, they have to wait for traffic to pass out of sight, so that no passers-by can find the route to their animals.

No visitors are allowed at Ambue Ari, and just half a handful of people work with an animal at any given time. This careful control of human contact limits the stress of human presence and changes in behaviour, prevalent in many zoos and other animal facilities. Often, it’s just one or two volunteers to an animal, and each animal has a minimum amount of time a person can work with them in order for a strong bond of trust to be formed. After two or three months at the most, the keepers must say goodbye to the animals in their care and move on, passing their knowledge on to a successor – although many volunteers stay on longer at the camp, starting work with a different animal. The often painful changeover is done to prevent animals becoming stressed or too attached to one particular keeper, causing depression when they must finally leave.

Life here is simple but busy, the work enjoyable but hard. Camp pulses with activity at human and animal mealtimes, then is silent as everybody dissolves into the jungle to see their animals, or collapse early into their straw mattresses in the evening.

During my stay, exceptionally low numbers of volunteers are having to pack in long hours to get all the work done. I ask Oso (“the Bear”), a Bolivian staff member who grew up at Ambue Ari, how many people they need to comfortably look after all fifty-five of the animals present at the time.

“Como cuarenta, mas siete estaff. Asi, todos los gatos caminan.

(Around forty, plus seven staff. That way, all the cats walk.)”

Ambue Ari is known to specialise in wild felines, and it does to astonishing lengths to use the best rehabilitation techniques for animals that are near-impossible to release successfully. Many of the cats can be leash-walked by their carers out of their enclosures and into their natural habitat, and each animal has its own devoted territory and trails. This method of enrichment (mental and/or physical stimulation) is as close as they can get to the lifestyle of their wild counterparts.

Each feline would ideally get at least one carer dedicated only to them – but current numbers make this impossible. I count the people listed on the accommodation whiteboard. It’s slim pickings: although Ambue Ari’s dorms can house fifty-four people in total, most are half empty. The six staff are supported by between ten and fifteen volunteers for the duration of my six weeks there. While I’m in charge of caring for just three focal animals – a puma, a red howler monkey and a night monkey – my duties involve helping with the care of many more to make up for the shortage of people. I find myself handing out meals to at least ten animals a day, with that number sometimes rising to seventeen when we have fewer people in camp. Others have more, and with good reason. Since some animals have to be attended to up to four times a day including giving out meals, filtered water, medicines and dietary supplements, animal care has to be split between people to even out workloads and make trips into the forest more efficient.

AA’s usual system is to assign a volunteer to just one or two animals, a social group such as a troupe of monkeys, or a subset of animals housed close together such as in quarantine. This allows workers to spend time bonding with each animal, creating and carrying out enrichment, cleaning, and maintaining enclosures. The more people there are working hard here, the better the animals’ lives are, and the more time and manpower can be spent on construction, improving enclosures or building new ones. At the time, Oso and construction coordinator Candy, another Bolivian, are working alone to build several new enclosures for the coatis (a raccoon-like mammal).

Raising the money for building materials isn’t easy, either. Around 80% of AA’s running costs are paid for by volunteer participation fees. At $400 for the first month and $12 for every subsequent night (three meals a day and accommodation included), they are some of the most affordable in the industry. But this comes at a price for the organisation instead.

“We’re losing USD $20K a year just on running the place,” Research and Finance Coordinator Ollie (from England) explains frankly. Part of CIWY’s commitment to transparency involves giving Ambue Ari volunteers open access to all of its financial books.

“It costs 8000 Bolivianos [USD $1,160] a week to pay for animal and human food, gasoline for the generator, and other routine expenses. That means to break even, we need two new volunteers to turn up every week and pay for at least a month’s stay.”

I compare this to what I’ve seen so far. Sometimes four arrive in less than a week, others no one arrives for ten days or so. The unpredictable flow of people often has Ollie asking people to pay their tabs early to avoid the camp’s reserves running dry.

The constant need for new people may be part of the reason why unlike other volunteer projects, there are no fixed start dates for work at Ambue Ari. CIWY’s website encourages people to “just turn up” at the door whenever they can, allowing backpackers with uncertain schedules to join more flexibly.

Another tactic I notice to make sure money and workhands don’t fall short is that staff repeatedly persuade volunteers to extend their stay, or return a few weeks after they leave. So many fall in love with the project and the animals that it’s not the hardest sell. One morning, Ollie even conducts a survey to see how volunteers feel about three- and six-month volunteering contracts. Some of us suggest a structured internship might attract more early-career wildlife workers.

Since all the volunteer fees are quickly sucked up just buying food for the animals, the staff need to find new ways to bring in extra cash, particularly when numbers are low. Beyond running a tuck shop and second-hand clothing rental for the messy work, there’s CIWY merchandise and clothing for sale, but this still brings in a trickle of just a few Bolivianos a month. Since their volunteers are budget backpackers and low-paid wildlife workers, pushing their generosity is often like drawing blood from a stone.

To raise money for the coatis’ enclosures, Ollie runs an auction on a social night in the Café, where volunteers go for drinks just outside the sanctuary on Fridays. Items for sale include a week of special gourmet breakfasts prepared by Ollie himself, a professional photoshoot of you working with your assigned animal (again by Ollie), a chance to take a particularly affectionate puma for a walk, and the rights to use a volunteer as your personal slave for a whole day (the result wasn’t pretty). After enough rum and beers, the dozen or so volunteers collectively bid a staggering sum over USD $1200 – enough to keep construction going on the coatis’ enclosures for the next few weeks.

But money and manpower aren’t Ambue Ari’s only worries. On the way back from a night off in the local village, the chatter in the back of the pickup truck falls silent as the volunteers smell smoke, and we pass several patches of land glowing bright orange in the dark.

On both sides of the road, in the fields just minutes away from the sanctuary, fires set by farmers rage unchecked in the night. With no one to tackle them, it could be just a few hours before the jungle is aflame.

 “Right, so you all saw the fires by the road on the way back from Santa Maria last night,” broaches Research and Finance Director Ollie cautiously at breakfast anuncios (announcements).

We had. On the way back from a night off in the local village, the chatter in the back of the pickup truck had fallen silent as the volunteers smelled smoke, and we passed several patches of land glowing bright orange in the dark.

Just a few kilometres from the park, it could be a matter of hours before the jungle catches fire, and the flames might reach the sanctuary.

“I’ve checked again this morning and they’re still going, just a few minutes from us. So I’m going to need a crew to come help me put them out straight after breakfast.”

It’s another problem that can leave the camp suddenly short on people for a morning: the occasional sudden call for volunteers to become impromptu firefighters.

Ollie rattles off a list of more than half a dozen names – almost half the workforce available in camp for the morning. The remaining volunteers will have to work extra hard to make up for our absence. We switch into non-synthetic clothes that won’t melt in the heat, fill water totes (read: recycled jugs previously holding cooking oil), and pile as many of the totes and of us as we can into the back of Oso’s truck.

When we get there, we realise how lucky we’ve been this time. Although there are several patches of fire to tackle spread along the road, they’re mostly small flames and glowing embers working through the grass. The fire is only just starting to eat at the bushes on the edge of the forest. The volunteers quickly put them out in just a couple of minutes each – but the difference this makes could be immense.

“They just set the fires and leave them unattended?” asks a volunteer from Australia.

“Yep,” replies Ollie. “They start as small things like these on the side of the road, but they can quickly get out of control. Some Mennonite farmers started one to clear land recently, and it ate up the forest for miles. That whole mountainside was glowing at night-” he points to a hill not so far from the sanctuary “- it was terrifying.”

Later, returning volunteer Ben (France) will describe to me how when he’d come a year before, they’d been hacking a firebreak trail in the jungle overnight for fourteen hours straight.

“It was tiring as hell, but when you see four-metre high flames headed towards the park, you find the motivation.”

Ollie then has us renew the fire trails as a preventative measure, maintaining them with machetes and rakes to prevent burns spreading into Ambue Ari’s land. It’s also part of routine maintenance for cages and enclosures to hack away a few metres of jungle outside the fences, making a fuel-free safety buffer for the animals. The extensive precautions are well-warranted: not only are the unchecked forest fires worryingly common, but buildings in camp were been set ablaze a few years before because of careless volunteers leaving lit candles unattended in dorms.

A few days after our first outing to tackle unchecked roadside fires threatening the forest, my name comes up in a morning anuncios list again, this time as part of “team Ollie”. We’re told to grab machetes before we head to the other side of AA’s land. My stomach tightens, fearing more fires must be on the way. But this excursion is altogether more hopeful.

Today, Ollie has us cutting a new trail through the jungle, leading with a GPS in hand as we hack away behind him with three-foot machetes. It’s sweaty work, but incredibly satisfying. I find myself swinging with such zeal, I almost hit the volunteer behind me in the face with my machete.

“Sorry,” I say, laughing nervously. “I’m used to using the little short ones.”

She stares at me with alarm. Briskly changing the topic, I ask:
“So what are we cutting this trail for, Ollie?”

He turns and holds up the GPS he has been transfixed by for the last twenty minutes, showing a path that as yet doesn’t exist in reality.

“This is a model simulation of the path going through the highest density of cacao trees in the area. We’re planning to harvest four tons of raw product through the trail we’re currently cutting.”

My mind starts racing. Agroforestry of feral cacao from a rewilding project – it was perfect. Marketing sustainably produced chocolate might be the silver bullet to end Ambue Ari’s financial worries. Explain that buying the chocolate helps fund AA’s wildlife rescue and rehabilitation, and you could also put the place on the map internationally. Returning volunteer Ben even suggests a single cacao harvest could fund the camp’s work for an entire year.

Jumping the gun, I’m already thinking about how this can involve the local community more in CIWY’s work.
“So you’ll pay people from Santa Maria to work the harvest, right? Then they can learn more about Ambue Ari and the good you’re doing. It’ll help form a better relationship with the locals.”

Ollie falters, and admits that at first they would be asking volunteers to participate in the harvest – they simply didn’t have enough to pay locals. I voice my disappointment, but see his point.

“How many volunteers do you need?” I ask.

“If we have sixteen people harvesting three hundred pods per hour each, we can get 250kg of end-product out.”

I raise an eyebrow. We have less volunteers than that now, and this is supposed to be the time of year when numbers peak. The harvest is around January, when the rain is heavy and the mosquitoes are rampant.

“How are you going to find that many people in wet season?”

There’s no hard and fast answer to that question.

It’s not until after I leave Bolivia that I think of another potential solution: pay Bolivian workers in cacao, a share of what they harvest each day. When I contact head veterinarian Alejandra (Bolivian) with my suggestion in early February, and ask about how the harvest is going, she has good news.

“They’re harvesting once a week, and fermentation is going well. Three locals have been contracted to help out. I’ll pass on your suggestion, it could also be a good option.

The volunteers are providing a lot of support, many have signed up to work on the cacao more than once a week.  We’re very hopeful about the results.”

Ollie describes a plan to conduct surveys of the wildlife in the harvested and unharvested areas of the forest, comparing them to make sure the agroforestry project isn’t affecting any other species. Many of the wild animals in the sanctuary also eat cacao fruit. But between managing AA’s finances and volunteers, applying for grants, and carrying out the research on the resident jaguar population, he admits he could use one or two jungle-hardy research assistants to help him out.
“The problem is, I can’t pay them.”

Ambue Ari is struck by the same affliction as most other wildlife-oriented projects: constant lack of at least one thing they need to function at the height of their potential. Like so many bases I’ve visited, I find myself thinking that they need more. More people, more money, more time, more resources, and more publicity. In this case, I’m stumped for what could function as quick fixes. They’re living on a knife’s edge, and that makes it all the more admirable that they’ve lasted this long. And although every day here may be a struggle, there is no question who’s winning.

All around Ambue Ari, trees are falling, animals are being taken dead or alive, and people are making money. Inside the sanctuary, people give time, money and energy to keep the project afloat and running, and to keep wildlife alive, healthy and happy. By capitalism’s standards, they may be on the brink of failure. But the riches they grow and protect are the type money cannot buy, and that will last generations.

When the volunteers slip their boots on to blistered feet and lift water, meat and fruit with weary arms, to them it may just seem like another long day at work. But to me, as they walk out to care for their charges, they are patrolling the battlements of a fortress that has stood strong against years of siege. Its walls may be pockmarked with age and black-burnt scars of war. Its skeleton crew may be tense, exhausted, at times on the verge of breaking. But Ambue Ari, and every animal in it, still stands.

Here, nature is winning.

You can be a part of this enduring victory. Come and stand on nature’s side. Volunteer to work at one of CIWY’s three sanctuaries in Bolivia here: https://www.intiwarayassi.org/volunteering/volunteering-at-parque-ambue-ari/