CONTINUED rampant poaching of jaguars and their main prey, the white-lipped peccary, has brought numbers of both species in the country’s southern Pacific region to unprecedented lows, and scientists aren’t certain enough animals remain to repopulate the zone. Once the small source populations of both species in Corcovado and Piedras Blancas national parks disappear, experts say the animals will likely become extinct from the area. Scientists working on perhaps the world’s most comprehensive jaguar study, headed by Eduardo Carrillo of the Universidad Nacional (UNA), warn that could happen as soon as this year.
MONTHS after an official request by functionaries of the Environment and Energy Ministry (MINAE) to declare a state of emergency in the area (TT, March 19), Corcovado National Park – spanning more than 54,000 hectares (133,439 acres) on the southwest corner of the Osa Peninsula – still lacks additional park guards officials say are necessary to curtail the killing.
Assistance provided by the Public Security Ministry in the form of police officers to accompany park guards on patrols ended May 15. And in spite of a media frenzy in March and several large donations to combat the poaching in Corcovado, the park’s northern border, where most illegal hunters enter, remains essentially unmanned because a project to re-open a guard station there is tangled in red tape.
POACHERS seek out the savored white-lipped peccary (Tayassa pecari) and kill them in groves with heavy weaponry, often times the AK-47, an automatic weapon that fires a damaging 7.62-millimeter round. They slaughter as many as 50 of the gregarious animals at a time, experts say, and sell the meat for ¢9,000 ($21) a kilogram on the black market.
Jaguars (Panthera onca) rely heavily on the peccary as a source of food: the cousin to the pig comprises nearly 70% of the great cat’s natural diet. With its food supply vanishing, the few remaining jaguars are leaving the relative safety of Corcovado and preying on livestock and dogs in the outlying communities. Residents then shoot the animals out of fear or to protect their own economic interests.
With their numbers as low as they are, Carrillo said that at this point, “to kill a jaguar is a mortal sin.”
ENVIRONMENT and Energy Minister Carlos Manuel Rodríguez told The Tico Times this week that President Abel Pacheco in May rejected MINAE’s request for an emergency declaration, saying the country does not have sufficient financial resources to pay for the additional park guards the declaration would entail.
He said Pacheco told him the government would not be able to fund additional guards until the Legislative Assembly approves the Fiscal Reform Plan, and that the emergency declaration “would not solve much, in pragmatic terms.”
The two-year-old tax proposal cannot be voted on until the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court (Sala IV) rules on an action of unconstitutionality that questions measures taken earlier this year to speed up the plan’s approval (TT, July 9).
“It’s not within my power to resolve the problem,” the Environment Minister said. “I would have to be President.”
According to the UNA study, residents of the Southern Zone have shot at least nine jaguars in the past year. Carrillo told The Tico Times the latest such killing was in April. He said the jaguar had developed a taste for dog meat and had killed several before it was shot.
Carrillo manages jaguar studies from Mexico to Panama, and has headed the UNA study for the past 14 years. He has spent years working in the jungle and interacting with indigenous communities. He said that unlike its more aggressive cousin, the puma, he has neither heard of nor read about a single incident of a jaguar attacking a human.
According to his study, based on information gathered through the use of radio collars, footprint tracking and a series of heat activated camera traps, the jaguars’ population in Corcovado has declined from 150 four years ago to between 40 and 50 now.
The decline, he said, began in 1994 when MINAE lost 50 park guards due to a lack of funding. But because of a general lack of care for the peninsula, he said, it was in 2000 that the hunting skyrocketed and the animals’ populations began to plummet.
IN addition to the assault the animals are facing from commercial poachers, wildlife on the Osa Peninsula is being chipped away by area residents who have traditionally hunted for subsistence.
Luis Angel Campos has lived in Dos Brazos, a small community comprised mainly of former miners that sits at Corcovado’s southeast edge, for 31 years. For years, Campos was an orero – he panned and mined gold in the park for a living.
“The orero is a hunter by nature,” he said. “We live in the mountains, and our meat comes from the mountains. It is simple that way.”
Campos said he and other community members have noticed area wildlife is rapidly disappearing. He said commercial hunters, who used to walk through the streets of Dos Brazos toting rifles and fresh kills, have also disappeared.
UNLIKE some other communities, says Walter Montes, chief park guard at the nearby Rio Tigre station, the residents of Dos Brazos have called the guards to report poachers entering the park.
Alvaro Ugalde, director of the Osa Conservation Area (ACOSA) and one of the men who designed Costa Rica’s national park system more than 30 years ago, said that though progress is slow, recent MINAE efforts have helped reduce hunting inside the park.
“I’m hoping that little by little we’re pushing them out,” Ugalde said. “That’s my plan: to make it hard for them to tease us the way they do.”
Ugalde responded to rumors of police and some MINAE functionaries hunting in the area by saying, “I would like to have names and concrete evidence.”
Elizabeth Jones and Abraham Gallo, who manage the Bosque del Río Tigre Lodge in Dos Brazos, said one main reason hunting has slowed in the zone is the sheer lack of animals.
“WE can’t tell people to come here for the wildlife, because there’s no wildlife left,” Jones said. “They’ve hunted it all.” Area residents said hunters do not limit themselves to peccaries. Poachers frequently kill the tepesquintle, a large fruit-eating rodent and another important food source of the jaguar, which like the peccary has a reputation for having excellent meat.
Sport hunters also kill the endangered tapir – the largest animal in Central America, which locals say tastes awful – and howler monkeys, even though the meat smells of urine when cooked. Gallo said poachers also target spider monkeys to feed their dogs.
Like the jaguars, the hunters are not confined by the boundaries of the park.
Sixty-year-old Alcides Parageles, who owns a 600-hectare private reserve northeast of the park, said his life has been threatened on numerous occasions – by men toting firearms and machetes – because of his efforts to keep poachers off his property.
Parageles said hunters enter his property and neighboring private reserves on motorcycles, motorboats, horses and on foot, well-armed and often accompanied by well-trained hunting dogs.
PARAGELES has been living on the property for 53 years. He admitted to occasionally hunting there to feed the two generations of his family living in his remote cabin with him, but he said he believes there is an important difference between the kind of hunting he engages in and the hunting he believes has drastically reduced wildlife on his property.
“There is one kind of mountaineer who is dying of hunger,” Parageles said. “There are others who are sport hunters, who use good hunting dogs to track down the jaguars and shoot them.”
Parageles said he has hidden in the bushes and attempted to photograph the hunters, and said he has called MINAE functionaries on numerous occasions to report the poachers. The one time they came, two years ago, a fleeing hunter fell and broke the stock of his rifle, which Parageles keeps in his home.
A few kilometers away from the entrance to Parageles’ property, José Luis Molina lives with his wife and four young children in a makeshift home with no walls. He said a real estate company purchased land between main roads and their former home, and threatened to pursue trespassing charges if he and his family continued entering, and so they left five years ago. Molina, unemployed, said he must hunt to feed his family.
“I don’t like to go around killing animals, but I do it for necessity,” he said.
Carrillo said that by itself, subsistence hunting outside the park would not be detrimental to the animals, but because of the dwindling numbers no type of hunting should be permitted now – anywhere.
So few jaguars remain in the area that Carrillo speculates they may already be inbreeding, which could make the remaining population too unstable to survive. Still, he thinks they may be salvageable.
“It’s possible things have improved a little bit, but it is not sufficient,” Carrillo said. “We are at the point where we must reverse this situation. But we must act now, and with energy.”
MINAE’s Rodríguez said he believes the jaguars can be saved, but he is worried that Corcovado alone will not be enough to support a population of the great cats over a long period of time, and pointed to the necessity for a biological corridor connecting Corcovado and Piedras Blancas, which sits just opposite the Golfo Dulce from the peninsula.
He said that though the government cannot provide any significant form of financial support to combat the poaching, Pacheco has been supportive of the battle.
Pacheco acknowledged the severity of the crisis at Tuesday’s Cabinet Meeting when questioned by The Tico Times, but said, “I can’t get rid of doctors to hire park guards.”
