- She has made censuses of the birds of her department and established bird-watching routes.
- Around 500 hundred people have attended the association’s courses and workshops.
PUTUMAYO, Colombia – Yehimi Fajardo only had to hear the shriek of the common potoo (Nyctibius griseus) once to understand why this night bird is accused — so unfairly — of being the protagonist of all kinds of dark stories in rural communities in South and Central America. The chirping, deep and choked, is more reminiscent of a witch’s laughter than a beautiful bird.
The night she first heard the potoo was in 2018, and Fajardo was on a farm in the El Escondite nature reserve, in the municipality of Villagarzón in the southwestern Colombian department of Putumayo, making an inventory of birds as part of the activities of the Alas Association. She helped establish the foundation in 2015 to conserve nature in this part of Putumayo and its different bird species.
Her work has helped position her as an environmental leader in the region. Putumayo is now recognized as one of the most popular destinations for ornithology in Colombia — no small accomplishment, considering that Colombia is a leading country in bird biodiversity, with almost 2,000 species registered in international guides such as eBird.
The reason for Fajardo’s expedition to El Escondite in 2018 was to expand the number of bird-watching routes that the Alas Association has and which, since its launch, have benefited nearly 500 people, most of them children and young people from the indigenous communities of the Amazonian foothills. Residents attend workshops where they are taught to recognize the songs of the more than 1,000 species of birds registered in their region, their ecosystem contributions, and the different strategies for their protection.
Throughout the morning and afternoon of that particular day, Fajardo was bird-watching. The plan was to continue on into the night. But by sunset, she ended up not going out.
“Around 10 p.m. I was getting ready to sleep, when I started to hear that sound that, little by little, increased in intensity,” Fajardo says from her home in Mocoa, the capital of Putumayo. “I imagined that it was a bird, but I was afraid to go out alone and meet some other animal, like a poisonous snake. It sounded like slow laughter approaching.”
She says she couldn’t sleep well that night. The memories of childhood evenings spent spinning traditional Colombian horror stories with the other children in Mocoa kept coming to her head. The creatures in those tales were fantastic ones such as elves and witches, and others like La Llorona, El Coco Pollo and La Patasola, and which she now associated with the ghostly tune that came from outside her window.
She had to wait a week before actually seeing a common potoo. When she did, she was positively surprised.
“It is a very beautiful bird, which, with its ocher plumage, camouflages itself on the trunks of the trees, always with a firm gaze toward the sky, hence its name. It has huge yellow and black eyes. We were lucky that the one we saw was hatching an egg,” Fajardo says, adding that she treasures that moment as one of the most beautiful in her life as a bird-watcher.
The birth of a bird-watcher
Yehimi Fajardo was born 35 years ago in Mocoa, the largest municipality in Putumayo, with just under 60,000 inhabitants. She is a single mother to a 12-year-old-daughter, Dahia Isabella, who is herself instilled with respect for nature. “She is my main pupil as a bird-watcher, and she is always the first to be ready to go to all the birdings,” Fajardo says proudly.
Fajardo grew up with two brothers and a sister, the children of a physical education teacher and a housewife. She spent her childhood and youth studying at Pio XII school, the largest in Mocoa, and playing typical Colombian games with her neighbors.
The real fun, she says, came at night, when she met her friends to tell these stories of mythological beings.
She remembers with special affection the weekends, a time for cookouts in which several families would contribute the ingredients for the traditional potluck of sancocho that, in the end, was prepared by the youngest in the Afán River and in the Cristalina gorge.
Paula Galeano, coordinator of the Putumayo program of the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), who has known Fajardo since 2016, says she believes the passion for social work that has highlighted Fajardo’s actions is rooted in those years and in the values that her family gave her. Despite not belonging to an indigenous ethnic group, in a region with a high percentage of these communities, they were always interested in working together with them for the development of Putumayo.
After school, Fajardo studied environmental technology at the Putumayo Technological Institute, the department’s main center for higher education. There, she learned about caring for environmental resources and about how human beings can have a positive impact on ecosystems.
After some work in Mocoa, and motivated by her paternal grandfather, Fajardo traveled to Bogotá in search of opportunity. While working at the city’s botanical garden as an environmental interpreter, she studied a specialization in environmental law at the Universidad del Rosario.
In 2013, after being unemployed for a year, Fajardo enrolled in a free diploma course on specialized guidance in the observation and conservation of birds in the Amazon foothills, led by Corpoamazonia, the main environmental authority in the region.
Two years later, motivated by her teacher, Aquiles Gutiérrez, Fajardo created the Alas Putumayo Association with some of her classmates. Its objective was to give continuity to the lessons acquired in the diploma and involve communities in the conservation of ecosystems and birds in the department, which has a privileged location at the convergence of the Amazon foothill and the Andes mountain range.
Putumayo: An ornithological destiny
“Fajardo was, without a doubt, one of the most outstanding students of this diploma. Always attentive and willing to learn, and with an enormous desire to share in the community the interest in knowing and protecting their territory,” says Gutiérrez, a biologist with a master’s degree in ecology from the National University of Colombia, and one of the most knowledgeable ornithologists in Colombia.
Among its first activities, the Alas Association began a census of waterfowl and “Christmas” birds, those that can be observed between December and January, when migratory species have already arrived from the northern hemisphere. They also made their first maps with bird-watching routes of Putumayo.
As the association’s inaugural director, Fajardo carried out observations in the Putumayo municipalities of Sibundoy, Colón, Puerto Asís, Valle del Guamuez, Villagarzón, Orito and Puerto Guzmán. She also ventured to the neighboring department of Nariño, taking records in Tumaco, Ñambí and El Morro.
She’s also made bird sightings in other departments of Colombia: in La Guajira she saw shorebird species; in Yopal, she met the jabirú stork; in Mitú, she traveled routes together with the indigenous communities and was able to observe the Guiana rock cock and the parrot hawk. Fajardo also made sightings in the San Andrés archipelago, in Bogotá, Cali, and in the department of Huila. In total, she calculates that she has observed more than 500 species of birds throughout Colombia, most of them in the Amazon.
In the year of its founding, the Alas Association nominated Putumayo to host the National Ornithological Meeting, the most important gathering of professional and amateur bird-watchers in Colombia. They won, and the chosen date was in November 2017. But in April that year, tragedy struck in Mocoa: after several days of intense rains, the Mocoa, Mulato and Sancoyaco rivers overflowed, causing a landslide that left more than 300 people dead and hundreds missing.
Despite the catastrophe, Fajardo decided to continue with holding the meeting, convinced that the event would be a unique opportunity to contribute to the recovery of her department. In the end, the meeting was a success: more than 250 people registered, gathering along 15 bird-watching routes, making it the largest ever.
“Beyond the numbers, which made us feel very proud, the main achievement for us was having all our visitors falling in love with the birds of our department. Proof of this is that many of the attendees have returned. In addition, we managed to integrate the community at a very difficult time,” Fajardo says.
Involving local communities
Since 2018, the Alas Association has been working with organizations such as ACT and the Association of Indigenous Women (Asomi) in the program Exploring Our Territory Through Birds, aimed at children and young people from 5 to 23 years old. The association has led three cycles of ornithology workshops under the program in the village of Planadas, Mocoa.
The first cycle was focused on the theory of sighting and the fundamentals of bird flight and taxonomy, as well as on their ecosystem contributions and functions as pollinators and seed dispersers. The youths also learned how to use basic sighting equipment and instruments, such as binoculars and field guides.
The second module, which took place last year, consisted of taking the children on their first excursions to put into practice what they had learned and to start using the different platforms and databases for registering birds on the internet, such as eBird and Xenocanto, in which bird-watchers can identify birds based on their melodies, while sharpening their ears before expeditions.
Those who have most taken advantage of these activities have been the children. “Before, I used to spend most of my time at home and I didn’t care much about what happened in the field with the birds. Thanks to Professor Fajardo’s very cool classes, I have learned that birds, in addition to being very cute, colorful and singing beautifully, are also necessary for nature to work well,” says Leidy Lorena Sapuyes, 12, one of Fajardo’s students.
This year, the association is scheduled to carry out the Friendly Houses with the Birds program, an initiative in which children and young people plant trees in their gardens where birds can nest and feed. “The idea is for children to participate in the whole process: from looking for the seeds of the plants that the birds consume, to planting them in their homes,” Fajardo says.
Alas is also looking to expand its work to the Yunguillo indigenous reservation, 34 kilometers (21 miles) from Mocoa, its hopes to benefit a dozen children. “This will be a very big challenge, because the indigenous people speak their own dialects and are often very shy. In addition, it will involve an additional financial effort, because we will have to make longer trips and find places to house the children,” Fajardo says.
However, she acknowledges that, in the end, the greatest reward will be to instill the love for birds among them. “The most gratifying thing has been to see how the children who used to play hunting birds with slingshots, now only think of taking care of them so that they can live better. This is what we hope to continue doing,” she says.
Thinking about the future
Alas’s work has not been without difficulties, and the lack of resources has been the main one. It currently depends on organizations like ACT to get funding and the necessary tools for bird observations. “Sometimes we only have five binoculars for 20 children, or we don’t have the field guides. This makes the job more difficult, but not impossible,” Fajardo says.
Another obstacle is the expansion of the urban area expansion into bird habitats, more pronounced since the 2017 landslide.
“Many families,” Fajardo says, are “fearful that another landslide will occur again, have begun to build their homes in the upper parts of the riversides, looking for safe areas, away from river channels. This has led to birds, as well as the other species of wild fauna in the region, to lose more and more ground of their habitats. We are concerned because, in Mocoa and Villagarzón alone, we have 23 threatened bird species, and we estimate that, throughout the department, there are more than 60 under some degree of risk.”
Despite these challenges, Fajardo and her Alas Association are still determined to carry out large-scale projects, such as the establishment of an ornithological institute in the Amazon, with several stations in all the departments sharing this dense rainforest that, they say, is full of birds to discover.
It’s an unprecedented project that, in the words of the ornithologist Gutiérrez, will only be possible thanks to the three values that Alas embodies and that are the same that every bird-watcher must have: motivation, discipline and, above all, a sense of conservation.
Banner image: Yehimi Fajardo birdwatching in Mocoa recently. Photo courtesy of the Alas Association.
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