Notes From the Field: Felicity Arengo

Thursday, September 09 9:25 am

Blogging from Argentina, Felicity Arengo (Associate Director of the Museum’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation) is counting flamingos. Andean flamingos leave their high-altitude lakes and disperse, among other places, to the cattle lands and soy farms of Argentina’s “pampas,” or fertile lowlands, for winter. Arengo and her colleagues have found numerous wintering sites over the last few years and are working to coordinate efforts to protect these birds from habitat destruction due to roads, mining, and agricultural practices, among other factors.

August 20, 2010

Photo courtesy of Felicity Arengo

The day began in my hometown, Rosario, Argentina, with my colleague Marcelo Romano and two students sorting through the gear we’ve gathered for our expedition. We stacked food coolers, rubber boots, and camping equipment on top of the Jeep. Inside we neatly packed our spotting scopes, computers, GPS, and other sensitive equipment. Marcelo and I are conducting a winter flamingo census in several wetlands nestled within Argentina’s primary agricultural zone.

It is winter here and up until last week, temperatures were well below freezing so I’ve come prepared with several wool and fleece layers, a couple of sleeping bags, hats, gloves, and scarves. But today seems almost like a spring day.

This winter census complements a comprehensive, simultaneous flamingo census that was performed in January this year, coordinated by the Grupo Conservacion Flamencos Altoandinos (GCFA). Of the six flamingo species worldwide, three are found in the Southern Cone. The Chilean Flamingo has a broad distribution throughout the region while the Andean Flamingo and Puna Flamingo are more restricted to wetlands in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Peru. Our counts focus on the latter two species; whose population numbers are cause for concern. With global population estimates at around 35,000, the Andean Flamingo is the rarest in the world, meriting its listing as one of the few foreign species in the US Endangered Species Act.

Photo courtesy of Marcelo Romano

Since 1997, the GCFA, an international initiative of scientists and conservationists, has been coordinating research and conservation activities focused on flamingos and their wetland habitats. The comprehensive censuses are key and involve dozens of trained volunteers simultaneously setting out to reach as many wetlands within the flamingo range as possible within a week’s time. After establishing a baseline with the first-ever reliable estimates of Andean and Puna Flamingo populations in the first few years, the group has since done two follow-up censuses in 2005 and early this year to track population trends. One important aspect we discovered early on is that the Andean Flamingo, originally thought to be relatively restricted to high altitude wetlands of the Andes, actually comes down from the mountains during winter months, particularly if the Andean wetlands freeze, to use the lowland wetlands of the Argentinean pampas. In the past five years or so, we have begun to realize the true importance of these wetlands in the Andean Flamingo’s life cycle. Read more »

After Darwin at AMNH: John Flynn

Friday, November 20 3:51 pm

Fossil Hunting Among Volcanoes With Paleontologist John Flynn

This year, scientists at the American Museum of Natural History are celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species with a collection of vignettes describing expeditions and ideas with links to Darwin’s seminal work.

It was during a siesta in the woods that Charles Darwin, exploring the Chilean coast more than three years into his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, was shaken by one of the strongest earthquakes known to the local inhabitants. On that February day in 1835, Darwin not only witnessed “the most awful spectacle I ever beheld… [with] not one house left habitable,” as he wrote to his sister Caroline, but he also had an epiphany:

The most remarkable effect of this earthquake was the permanent elevation of the land… [which revealed] mussel-shells still adhering to the rocks, ten feet above high-water mark.… At Valparaiso… similar shells are found at the height of 1,300 feet: it is hardly possible to doubt that this great elevation has been effected by successive small uprisings.

Chilecebus, a reconstruction of which is shown above, is one of the fossils that John Flynn and colleagues have uncovered in the Chilean Andes (Illustration by Velizar Simeonovski, courtesy of John J. Flynn)

While sailing across the Atlantic and past Tierra del Fuego, Darwin had been reading Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, in which Lyell laid out the case that massive geological change is based on the slow accumulation of minute changes over time. It was through this lens that Darwin observed the volatile, shifting landscapes that partly informed his theory of evolution.

We now know that the active geology of Chile—the earthquakes, volcanoes, and formation of the Andes Mountains themselves—is caused by the squeezing of the Pacific Ocean plate under South America and back into the Earth’s interior. Paleontologist John Flynn and colleagues André Wyss, Reynaldo Charrier, and Darin Croft have traversed this geology over the last 20 years to learn more about both the history of the Andes and the unusual extinct fauna that lived on this former island continent. Mountain uplift drives fossil beds to the surface, weathering exposes fossil teeth and bone, and volcanic debris dates their time frames.

“We were first drawn to Chile because amateur naturalists found whale bones at 6,000 feet in the 1980s,” says Flynn. “Since then, we’ve uncovered a remarkable mammalian menagerie that explains some of the diversity seen today and also helps us understand more of the uplift history of this 5,000-mile-long mountain chain that forms a spine along then entire western edge of South America.” Read more »