The Grey Bird That Saved Ecuador: How One Rare Species Funded a Network of 123,000 Acres and Countless New Habitats

In the late 1990s, a group of scientists were birdwatching in a remote forest in Ecuador when they heard a call like no other. Following this mysterious avian siren, they saw a fairly large bird colored grey, black and brown standing up on stilted legs like a wading bird. None of them had ever seen its like and its discovery was a watershed moment for conservation in the country.

Locals called the bird a jocotoco and it would turn out to be a completely new species to science. The largest member of a group of antbirds known as avids, it was given the name Grallaria ridgelyi in honor of the ornithologist Robert Ridgely who organized the fateful 1997 trip. Officials found the bird on the eastern mountainsides of the Andes near the border with Peru and Ridgely urgently sought funding to buy the land on which they saw it.

That funding allowed them to establish the Tapichalaca Reserve. It was the first stop in what would become a network of 19 private landscapes protecting 123,000 acres. Managed today in partnership with local communities, the Jocotoco Foundation has decisively shown what one pretty bird can do. The foundation protects and restores wildlife habitat from Amazon rainforests to high Andean paramos into the wet Chocó and the dry Tumbes across the ocean to the Galápagos.