By Georgia Sparling
What was once an industrial rice field is quickly turning into a “postage stamp”-sized paradise in a remote corner of Costa Rica and restoring hope to one Lesley researcher.
“It’s this place for humans and wildlife to live in peace and harmony,” says Natural Sciences and Mathematics Division Chair Dr. David Morimoto.
The reforestation has brought dozens of indigenous wildlife to the property.
With a grant from Lesley, he has begun to document the restoration of the 12-acre plot of land, which is already getting traffic from dozens of creatures, some of them endangered.
Taking the field out of fieldwork
In 2014, the founders of Foster Parrots, a conservation and parrot rescue nonprofit, joined with other conservationists to purchase the land, which is on the Osa Peninsula, an area that National Geographic Magazine called “the most biologically intense place on Earth.”
A tapir prowls the property at night and is captured on a camera paid for through a grant from Lesley.
The group, eventually established as the Finca Paradiso Land Conservation Trust, wanted to reestablish habitats that would be friendly to macaws and other indigenous animals. Strategically situated next to Corcovado National Park and adjacent to a river, the land may be small, but has the potential to thwart poaching by creating a barrier on one side of the forest, provide habitat for animals and fight climate change through reforestation.
Morimoto signed onto the project before visiting the property. But from pictures, he could see that the land had only one tree at the time the trust purchased it. In the years since, it has gone from a field to a burgeoning forest. Native trees, along with strategic varieties that attract parrots and macaws, were planted along with 26 species of fruit, including lychees, papaya, starfruit and limes.
These two photos with community member and Foster Parents volunteer Paul Brennan show five years of growth on the property.
Formerly flyover land for birds, the trees now hold dozens of red-lored amazon parrots, and Morimoto recently discovered that many more animals have moved in.
Where the deer and the anteaters play
With a $4,600 Faculty Life and Development Grant from Lesley, Morimoto has begun to study the progress and effects of the land’s restoration. Through the grant he purchased trail cameras and birdsong recorders that he installed on the property in January. The footage proved livelier than Morimoto expected.
“The amount of wildlife is ridiculous,” he said. Cameras picked up photos and video of anteaters, tapirs, opossums, raccoons, deer, pacas, white-faced capuchin monkeys, a troop of peccaries and a family of ocelots.
Macaw that used to fly over the property now come there to roost.
“It’s almost as if we need to put up traffic lights on our trails,” said Morimoto. “I already have enough data to look at individual movement patterns of these species. It’s just proof that humans and wildlife can create a sort of paradise.”
In additional to wildlife, Morimoto will track the growth of trees on the property, their carbon capture and the impact the project may have on climate change.
It’s only natural
Morimoto and the other members view the project as something that will be of benefit to wildlife and people and foster a mutually beneficial coexistence, a “reforestoration.”
Dr. David Morimoto plans to visit the preserve at least once a year for the next decade to study the reforestation.
“We’re reforesting and we’re restoring, not just the forest and all of its wildlife but ourselves,” Morimoto says.
That has proven true in the scientist’s own life. Morimoto got his PhD more than 30 years ago, and the decline in the environment in the intervening years is a consistent source of discouragement.
“Earth Day 1990, we were thinking we were going to stop climate change,” he says.
Wildlife is never far away on the preserve, including a boa constrictor making itself at home at the open-air house on the property.
Yet, seeing nature’s swift reclamation of the trust’s land has given him a fresh perspective.
“I have more hope in my life after doing the research seeing how resilient nature is,” he says.
Morimoto plans to study the restoration for the next 10 years and envisions Lesley interns and colleagues visiting the property for data collection, education and research.