The red-fronted macaw is found nowhere but in the sandstone canyons of central Bolivia. There may be less than 1000 individuals alive.

The bird fills a niche, literally, nesting in small holes high in the cliff side. While this may have been an evolutionary breakthrough, freeing the bird from the predations of pumas and foxes, the stone alcoves eventually became death traps as we will see below.

Fortunately for this endangered species, a group of conservationists bought its largest nesting site, in San Carlos, Omereque, and built a visitors’ lodge near the food of the cliff, and taught local people to run the guest house, to keep the money and split it once a year between the three nearest communities.

It was a shrewd move because the macaw’s worst natural enemy is the human being. Once a year, just before the young birds are old enough to leave the nest, young men lower themselves over the top of the cliff-face on ropes and capture fledgling chicks to sell for $20 or more to people who cage them and teach them to imitate human speech, especially the sillier versions of it, such as football slogans and strings of cuss words.

Kidnapping macaw chicks is an easy traffic to stop, if a community wants to, because the nesting cliffs are in full view of the village, and the hunting season is just once a year: easy to anticipate and police. At least two other bird species, the Bolivian blackbird and the cliff parakeet also live in the cliffs, and while not quite as appealing as a brilliant, emerald and vermillion macaw, the other birds are also protected.

Not every endangered species can be protected by buying 50 hectares of land and putting up a comfortable lodge. Some animals range over vast forests and can be hunted in secret. But for some species, this is a model. The nifty part is that the donors who buy the land don’t need to make a profit. They are investing money to keep a species alive. The project generates small amounts of money that can be given to nearby communities, to spend on schools and potable water, and encourage people to protect the wildlife.

Since 2006, people from the Bolivian NGO Armonía have spent a lot of time teaching the local people about the value of the macaw. Farmers noticed the birds scrounging for peanuts in the soil or eating the occasional ear of corn, and assumed that the macaws were pests. Guido Saldaña of Armonía explained to the people that this damage was minimal, more unsightly than economically important.

Still, relatively few visitors come, because Omereque is so remote, a six to eight hour drive from the nearest airport (about equidistant from either Santa Cruz or Cochabamba).

A Bolivian newspaper article reports that the three neighboring villages received about $7000 last year. And the villagers earned money from agricultural projects with Armonía, such as growing papaya.

Local people say that the youth who once robbed the nests still do so, they just go further into the canyons, in places where the birds are unprotected. I don’t say this as a criticism of the youth, the communities or any of the organizations that are involved. Villagers often protect a common resource and set up rules about how to use it, to conserve it. In Omereque, with the help of sympathetic outsiders, the villagers have turned the cliff-face into a formal, organized common, with rules that prohibit the extraction of birds. The village youth are still happy to risk their necks dangling over other cliffs to filch baby birds, but now the boys go outside the regulated common. The youth are free-riders, not apparently convinced of the conservation ethic, but benefitting from the increased supply of breeding pairs of macaws, thanks to the protected site. No solution is perfect.

At least we know that their nesting sites can be protected, one haven at a time.

Scientific names:

Red-fronted macaw, Ara rubrogenys (Spanish: paraba frente roja)

Cliff parakeet, Myiopsitta luchsi, (Spanish: cotorra boliviana)

Bolivian blackbird, Oreopsar bolivianus (Spanish: tordo boliviano)

Last week Ana and I went to see the monkeys at Inti Wara Yassi, a refuge for abused animals in Bolivia, where the little squirrel monkeys dangle from the tips of the branches in the trees around the visitor’s center.

Inti Wara Yassi takes in animals that have been in some form of captivity: circuses, cages and even as pets. Ideally the animals are released to the wild, but most of the animals are highly habituated to people, and there is little wild forest remaining around the park, so most of the animals stay nearby.

The young women at the reception desk had lost all interest in educating the visitors. She discouraged us from reading the informational displays so she could drone out the list of rules and fees. She spoke at a whisper while her TV boomed in the background. She kept referring to us, with brutal honesty, as “tourists� instead of as “visitors,� “guests� or “the public.�

Because the animals are released prisoners, one would expect them to be a little messed up. A sign in the park says that some of the animals have “serious ethological problems of behavior� (graves problemas etológicos de comportamiento). Since the word “ethological� merely means “animal behavior� it adds no new meaning to the sentence, although it is a great way to show off one’s vocabulary.

And then we hiked up to El Mirador, the peak overlooking this park which was built in the old installations of the cable car which once spanned the Espírutu Santo River. The rusty cables still hang over the water.

Two young couples and their small children joined us. They were from the highlands, but had lived for years here in the humid tropics. Then we were joined by a troop of large spider monkeys. One of the little girls screamed in terror. When the monkeys are two feet away they seem a lot bigger than when they are in the zoo. They had come down from their natural habitat in the treetops to frisk the humans of their candy and junk food. The monkeys grabbed water bottles out of people’s hands, and then threw the water to the floor once they tasted it and realized it was not soda pop.

One over-habituated mother monkey with a half-grown baby crawled into Ana’s lap and went to sleep.

Then a large troop of men came to the top. They were in early middle age and far wilder than the monkeys. They yelled so loudly they woke up the mom asleep in Ana’s arms. When one of the monkeys climbed onto the back of one of the guys he shrieked for his friends to take his picture for Facebook.

For good reason the park staff become disenchanted with the visitors, most of whom seemed wildly out of place in the woods. A long-haired young Englishman ignored the “do not feed the animals� sign, took out a bag of peanuts in the shell, and fed them one by one to the monkeys.

We had learned at the reception desk that we had to leave our backpacks at reception, and that we could not take in food. Now, surrounded by frustrated, sugar-loving monkeys, I could see the reasons behind the rules. As with an extension message for farmers, the underlying background principles count. It is not enough to tell people what to do. We also want to know why. In this case:

• These monkeys have lost all fear of people

• The monkeys are addicted to sugary snacks

• Processed food is bad for the animals

• Leave behind your backpacks so you won’t be tempted to feed them

The park was littered with plastic trash. Ana said we should go back to town, buy trash bags and pick up all the garbage in the park. On our second walk up to the peak we saw that all those peanuts had given the monkeys diarrhea. So there was another reason why one should not feed the animals.

• Even peanuts give monkeys diarrhea.

In the future, managing wild animals will become more and more like ranching, as there are fewer animals, less wild land, and more poachers and more guys with chain saws. The reserves will need more staff, more money and more collaboration from the public. Part of the solution will be to tell visitors the reasons why, in words that everyone understands, and to make people feel like constituents, not like a nuisance.

When I first heard about “bush meat� being served in West African restaurants, I was alarmed that endangered species were being driven to the dinner table. After travelling in West Africa, I see it’s more complicated than that. While I have been served an antelope’s nose in an outdoor restaurant in Ghana, by far the wild animal most likely to be on the plate is the grasscutter (Thryonomys swinderianus), also known as the greater cane rat, a big, pudgy rodent that fills the ecological niche of the rabbit, and actually expands its range with agriculture. The creature lives up to its name and eats grass, as well as tubers, and loves nothing as much as a field of ripening rice. So the grasscutter is among that most off-beat class of crop pests: the vertebrates.

Grasscutters are such pests that extension agents in Sierra Leone once asked me to help them write fact sheets for farmers on how to manage the “cutting grass� (as it is called in Sierra Leone) with fences and by hunting. In parts of Nigeria hunters bag enough grasscutters to offer them for sale, hanging from stalls by the side of the highway, along with the occasional rat. If the carcasses are not sold when they are fresh, the hunter can smoke them into a kind of rodent ham.

In Benin, fewer grasscutters are killed, but are avidly eaten. I once had lunch in a roadside café in Central Benin. A man and two women, all well dressed in sweeping West African garb, lingered over lunch while another man, fresh from the field, tantalized them with his freshly killed cane rat. The trio said barely a word as they eyed the trophy. The hunter stoked its soft fur and gently turned it from one angle to the next. He never stopped talking.

“That guy really has a story to tell about his grasscutter,� I said, not understanding a word.

“He’s trying to sell it, but the people at the table think he wants too much money for it,� said my Beninois friend Florent Okry. Benin is a patchwork of languages, but Florent had done thesis fieldwork near here, and happened to speak the local language.

As we got into the car to drive north, the trio was strapping the grasscutter onto the back of their motorcycle, obviously pleased with it.

A new video called “Feeding grasscutters� explains that hunters have thinned out the creatures just a bit too much in Benin. Pest control has been too successful. So now people are starting to raise the animals in hutches, feeding them cut grass and other plants.

In the video, local farmer Pierre Sessinou looks into the camera and says that he went to Cotonou to become a motorcycle-taxi driver, but he failed, so he came back to his village to make a good living raising grasscutters.

Farmers invariably learn some of the natural history of their pests, especially large ones that are easy to observe. Another farmer in the video, Aguemon Ahoundhode, tells the audience how he noticed that in the field, grasscutters peel manioc tubers before eating them, so Mr. Ahoundhode peals manioc tubers before serving them to his furry livestock.

After a lapse of thousands of years, humans are once again domesticating new animal species. In his book Farmers’ Bounty, Stephen Brush writes that farmers add to the genetic diversity of the crop species they domesticate (2004, Yale University Press). The same is true for animals, and sometimes the wild version continues to run free in its original range.

Guinea pigs were domesticated by ancient Andean peoples, and one of the charms of living in Cochabamba, Bolivia, is that occasionally we still see wild guinea pigs grazing on the lawn, or at the edge of a field, until the startled animals see the humans and dive into the safety of a hole in a stone wall. Wild guinea pigs look a lot like scaled down grasscutters and are smaller, and leaner than pet guinea pigs. The wild one is called k’ita qoy in Quechua (“k’ita� meaning wild and “qoy� meaning guinea pig, probably in imitation of the sound the nervous little animals make). All of the k’ita qoys are all the same grey-deer color of the grasscutter. All of the crazy colors of pet guinea pigs (and the long haired varieties) were selected by human breeders. One wonders what the domestic grasscutter will look like in 1000 years, but for now they are all grey.

Learn about feeding these new domesticates in this video in English Feeding grasscutters

In French Alimentation des aulacodes

And in Fon, a language of southern Benin, http://www.accessagriculture.org/fr/node/938/fon

“Feeding grasscutters� was made by Betty Khoury, Gilbert Démbé, Issiakou Moussa, Justin Lekoto, Josephine Rogers, Marcella Vrolijks and Paul Van Mele. Production was sponsored by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).