Abstract
Virtually everywhere, birds draw a crowd and receive great public attention. Our fascination with, and reverence for, birds was underscored by the global response to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, in which she questioned human and global survival in light of the massive decline in songbird populations resulting from widespread pesticide use. And most people have probably thought at least once in their lives about “just flying away” like a bird or like Icarus from Greek mythology. And would it not be awesome “to fly like a bird” straight to the tropics for an exotic winter vacation, or to hover among the stunning canopies and watch down on earth, simply leaving all problems behind? Tropical birds never lose their allure for us. Some heroic bird investigators in the Caribbean might well have provided the foundation for the modern James Bond 007 character (a British spy;). Regardless, birds were used by the British Commonwealth for centuries to make the new colonies abroad more attractive, a strategic policy to use the natural history as a public relations tool. It was a policy that the Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonial powers did not pursue, thus leaving their colonies’ natural history poorly described to this very day. Such a mind-set is still in existence in British institutions today. It likely gave the global conservation partnership, BirdLife International, a cultural head start. Many of the colonial legacies still carry on (a feature that the Smithsonian Institution in the USA, for instance, gets often criticized for, e.g., not being sufficiently “modern” and progressive on environmental issues like climate change, globalization, poverty eradication, and efficient conservation).
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Acknowledgments
Over the years, many people helped us with this work, namely A. Breton, G. Humphries, M. Schmid, the H. Gundersen family, D. Nemitz, Thomas Wienecke and B. Welker. G. Yumin and his student team, and many field school students. We are grateful to Maderas Rainforest Conservancy for access to the land. This is EWHALE lab publication # 109.
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19.1 Electronic supplementary material
Appendices
Appendices
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1.
Excel sheet with comments for Master and Mann (2004) and the author’s list for June 2011 with metadata
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Zipped archive of bird photos
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Top 20 bird species lists for both sites (La Suerte and Ometepe) with metadata
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Digital list of geo-referenced bird sightings from Lawson (2009) as ESRI shapefile
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“Show and tell” lists for La Suerte station, Costa Rica, and Ometepe station, Nicaragua (metadata and MS Excel sheets)
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Huettmann, F. (2015). Birds of Ometepe (Nicaragua) and La Suerte (Costa Rica): From a Narrative and Species Lists Over Species Richness and Bird Photo Documentations to a Central American Conservation Ornithology. In: Huettmann, F. (eds) Central American Biodiversity. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2208-6_19
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