Oro Blanco: How Salt Farms in Honduras Maintain Other folks and Shorebirds

Within the San Lorenzo Bay of Honduras, salt farms supply golden alternatives for maintaining generations—of folks, of shorebirds, of an artisanal way of living.

From the Summer season 2024 factor of Dwelling Chook mag. Subscribe now.
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“I’m the 3rd technology of a circle of relatives of artisanal salt manufacturers in San Lorenzo,” says Julia Salazar proudly. She is the daughter of Julio Salazar, who has been harvesting salt from this bay at the Pacific coast of Honduras since 1988—and granddaughter of Sabas Nicolas Salazar Molina, who got here to the bay in 1928 from an inland the city, attracted through the possibility of this treasured mineral.

“As a kid,” Julia Salazar recollects, “I keep in mind waking up at crack of dawn and gazing the selection of what folks right here name oro blanco [white gold].”

In Honduras all salt manufacturing is artisanal, a small-scale agricultural operation most commonly performed through hand. Staff sweep shallow pans of seawater with push brooms to pile up mounds of salt. The area round San Lorenzo Bay provides many of the nation’s salt, upwards of 75% of all of the salt harvested in Honduras. However past the lapping waves of the Pacific and the huge mounds of white gold swept up through the salt harvesters, Julia Salazar recollects one thing else unique from her formative years rising up on San Lorenzo Bay—the birds. And specifically, one hen that captured her center: the Black-necked Stilt, referred to as soldadito [little soldier], since the approach it walks resembles the way in which squaddies march.

“It used to be this species that stuck my consideration probably the most and made me ponder birds extra,” she says, recalling how as a little bit lady she changed into enthusiastic about the habits of the stilts strolling round in search of meals, and nesting within the saltgrass simply above the residences of the unreal lagoons throughout the circle of relatives salt farm. “What me probably the most used to be how each the female and male offer protection to their nests and chicks,” says Salazar, who as of late is a mom of 3. “I felt very known with that.”

That maternal bond between Salazar and the stilts has grown into her existence’s paintings, as she is now advocating for the safety of those shorebirds and their nests within the San Lorenzo Bay. For the previous decade, she has been a pace-setter in a cross-disciplinary effort amongst companies and biologists to lift consciousness and safeguards for the mangrove forests and intertidal wetlands that make this bay some of the essential ecosystems within the nation. In 2022, the buildup of knowledge about shorebird concentrations within the area resulted within the designation of the Punta Condega–Jicarito wetland device as a 112,000-acre website online of regional significance within the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Community—the primary WHSRN website online in all of Honduras.

Salazar’s adventure to assist acquire nationwide and global reputation for the San Lorenzo Bay has been a winding one, from tourism to birding to fostering a way of group empowerment a few of the salt farmers. However the only consistent has been the pressure and imaginative and prescient of Julia Salazar herself.

“What sticks out maximum about her is her management,” says Osvel Hinojosa-Huerta, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Coastal Answers Fellows program, which Salazar joined in 2023. “She has controlled to deliver in combination numerous salt manufacturers and helped them know about shorebirds and the function that salt manufacturing performs of their conservation.”

A Custom Greater than Two Millennia Previous

The follow of harvesting salt within the San Lorenzo Bay is going again greater than 2,000 years ahead of the Spanish conquest, when the Indigenous Chorotega folks migrated from Mexico and settled in what’s now El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Their livelihoods revolved round fishing, mangrove logging, and salt manufacturing—at all times deeply intertwined with the ebb and glide of the tides.

The Chorotega harvested salt through evaporating seawater via boiling—a convention that required chopping down mangrove timber for firewood, and that endured with the arriving of the Spaniards at the start of the sixteenth century. Salt harvesting used to be essential for the preservation of fish and meat. The Spanish extensively utilized salt to make their foreign money. Colonial mining actions close to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, required salt for the amalgamation technique of silver and gold, which spurred the salt business within the Gulf of Fonseca.

The upper call for for salt referred to as for more practical and no more expensive processes. Originally of the twentieth century, the salt business started to depend on shallow tanks referred to as dry-racks that seize daylight to make stronger the evaporation of seawater. This innovation no longer simplest progressed the standard and yield of salt, it relieved power on mangrove forests. And, the salt pans created new habitats for shorebirds to buckle down and do and pick aquatic invertebrates within the shallow evaporating swimming pools of sea water. Along side its in depth muddy plains and estuaries, the San Lorenzo Bay as of late is thought of as essential breeding and migratory stopover habitat for shorebirds.

“The Gulf of Fonseca (which contains San Lorenzo Bay) is of significant significance for a number of species of shorebirds, such because the Semipalmated Sandpiper and Least Sandpiper, as a result of this is a resting and feeding house,” says Nicaraguan hen ecologist Salvadora Morales, a conservation specialist for the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Community. “Some species just like the soldadito even use it as a breeding house.”

In 1999 the San Lorenzo Bay and 6 different neighboring spaces within the Gulf of Fonseca won reputation as a wetland website online of global significance below the Ramsar Conference, partially because of the numerous congregations of shorebirds. The designation additionally said the area as the most important habitat for hawksbill and ridley sea turtles, American crocodiles, and imperiled mangrove intertidal wetlands.

“The website online, most commonly mangrove wooded area, is without doubt one of the nation’s maximum essential ecosystems,” reads the professional declaration for Ramsar website online quantity 1000.

However regardless of the lofty declaration, the Ramsar designation did little to mitigate the gulf’s vulnerability to nationwide and global company pursuits, like increasing agricultural building for rising melons and sugarcane, and the burgeoning shrimp business. Because the center of the twentieth century, the Gulf of Fonseca has misplaced about part of its unique wetland wooded area quilt. “The problem lies in having protecting declarations with out enough budget for implementation,” laments Jorge Palma, Julia Salazar’s husband and the technical director of a countrywide park in central Honduras.

As San Lorenzo’s Birds Acquire Consideration, Ecotourists Take Observe

Julia Salazar graduated from faculty in 2009 and returned house to her circle of relatives’s salt farm—the Salinera Santa Alejandra—with some extent in tourism from the Technological College of Honduras. In class she won revel in carrying out excursions for the general public, and now she had a need to assist Hondurans be told concerning the artisanal tradition of the salineras of San Lorenzo Bay.

She began through making a excursion of her circle of relatives’s salt farm, and she or he named her venture Sal Para L. a. Conservación [Salt for Conservation], with a broader project to offer protection to the marine-coastal ecosystems of southern Honduras. In the long run she was hoping to unite all of San Lorenzo’s salt manufacturers below the banner of environmentally pleasant productiveness.

In 2012 Salazar introduced a easy Fb web page providing instructional excursions to anyone curious to be told about salt manufacturing and its ecological advantages. Faculty academics and college professors instantly replied to enroll in the excursions. However then Salazar says the excursions began attracting a special roughly buyer: “We apparently additionally began receiving visits from birders, attracted through the benefit that the salt farms supply for shorebird gazing … vacationers from Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, after which from the usA. and Europe.”

Abruptly Salazar had a renewed pastime within the Black-necked Stilts that she had watched as a little bit lady, and she or he took nearer realize of the little rock-like brown eggs on her circle of relatives’s salinera alongside the shores of San Lorenzo Bay.

“I came upon small nests made with seashells, small rocks, and branches, containing 3 to 4 eggs guarded through folks prepared to battle to offer protection to them,” Salazar says. “I discovered that they at all times nest ahead of the start of the rains at the shores of the lagoons within the salt farms. Alone initiative I began tracking the lagoons per 30 days looking for nests or chicks.”

Salazar’s personal observations documented that Black-necked Stilts additionally nest in shrimp farms, although she says they to find artisanal salt farms to be a extra non violent surroundings for elevating chicks: “There may be a long way much less disturbance than somewhere else.”

Appreciation Grows for the Price of Shorebirds—and the Hemispheric Significance of San Lorenzo Bay

Round 2014, Salazar’s salt farm excursions attracted biologists from Aves Honduras, a nonprofit ornithological affiliation, who began carrying out professional annually shorebird inhabitants surveys in San Lorenzo Bay. The shorebird census knowledge popping out of San Lorenzo Bay then attracted the eye of biologists from the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Community, a world conservation science partnership that has known and seeks coverage for roughly 120 critical-habitat websites for shorebirds right through the Americas.

“I accompanied a biologist from Aves Honduras to look at the habits of Himantopus mexicanus [Black-necked Stilt] and Anarhynchus wilsonia, referred to as the Wilson’s Plover,” Salazar says. Those studies marked an important shift in her dating with shorebirds. Whilst she first of all targeted her efforts for Sal Para L. a. Conservación on organizing excursions and selling salt manufacturing, she felt her function evolving into accumulating very important knowledge to know how salt farms reinforce shorebird habitats.

However first, she must convince her father. As a result of like the majority of salt farmers and neighboring shrimp farmers within the bay, Julio Salazar idea the birds have been a danger.

“We idea their droppings by hook or by crook affected the salt,” he says. He additionally idea the shorebirds depredated a shrimp-farming plot he used to be working: “I believed they ate them. So I used to shoot them with the shotgun.”

Undeterred, Julia Salazar started selling shorebird gazing at the Sal Para L. a. Conservación excursions, and in 2020 she parlayed her personal casual hen surveys at the salt farms right into a personnel place with the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Community, the place she changed into the salt and shorebirds conservation specialist for the WHSRN Flyways Program. Her activity all for growing a shorebird-conservation-oriented salt-production overview, organising shorebird-friendly salt manufacturing highest practices, and figuring out the threats and advantages to shorebirds at salt manufacturing websites.

Shorebird surveys performed via WHSRN and Aves Honduras within the San Lorenzo Bay and surrounding spaces yielded vital concentrations—greater than 12,000 Western Sandpipers counted in a single position, and every other depend of five,000 Semipalmated Sandpipers, a hen cited as a Tipping Level Species within the 2022 State of the Birds record. (Tipping Level Species have declined 50% previously 50 years, and are on course to lose every other part in their present inhabitants within the subsequent 50 years.)

At top tide, one of the most counts discovered a meeting of greater than 100 American Oystercatchers, together with some with leg bands that indicated that they had been marked on their breeding grounds from Massachusetts to Florida through U.S. Fish and Natural world Provider biologists. Different counts tallied mixed-species clusters of greater than 20,000 sandpipers, stilts, and avocets—together with Stilt Sandpiper and Whimbrel, each Tipping Level Species.

The tough shorebird knowledge made the case for the primary Honduran WHSRN Web page of Regional Significance, designated in 2022 within the Punta Condega–El Jicarito wetlands ecosystem within the japanese Gulf of Fonseca. It additionally changed into the primary declared WHSRN website online that hosts vital numbers of Double-striped Thick-knees, a big shorebird species that levels from Central to South The united states.

“The declaration of the most important website online for Punta Condega-El Jicarito Device is a chance for native actors to hold out concrete habitat control movements for the conservation of shorebirds,” says Morales, the WHSRN shorebird conservation specialist. “Now we have already controlled to get shrimp farms within the house to sign up for the community for hen tracking.”

All of the consideration for shorebird habitat round San Lorenzo Bay has raised the profile of the Sal Para L. a. Conservación excursions. About 5,500 vacationers and scholars have taken the excursions so far, together with the U.S. ambassador to Honduras.

“We changed into a hotspot for birdwatchers,” says Salazar, who says the birders helped alternate her father’s thoughts concerning the birds. Now the opposite earnings generated through the excursions represents 5% of the salt farm’s annual source of revenue, and a fashion is being established for bird-friendly salt manufacturing. “My dad has a special mentality and participates within the excursions, welcoming visitors and appearing them the corporate his father based.”

In essence, Salazar says the spirit of her venture is selling a way of belonging amongst San Lorenzo’s salt manufacturers, to the encircling nature on which they rely—and likewise to the craft in their paintings.

“Once we permit the manufacturer to be a part of those projects and display them the amazement and interest of many about their paintings, we’re opening essential paths so as to add productive sectors to the conservation of the herbal surroundings of the south of Honduras,” she says.

Reliable Coverage, and a unbroken function for ecotourism

In March 2023 the federal government of Honduras formally ratified the WHSRN website online declaration of the Punta Condega–El Jicarito wetlands ecosystem with Legislative Decree 5-99-E, which categorised the land below the class of Habitat Control.

However Salazar fears that, as with the Ramsar website online designation 25 years in the past, the true conservation affect might be minimum, because the Habitat Control designation integrated no motion plan to strengthen control and preservation.

Given the low ranges of state funding that the central executive can put into Habitat Control lands in southern Honduras, Salazar sees birding tourism and sustainable, artisanal salt farms as the most productive hope for making sure the way forward for San Lorenzo Bay as the most important habitat for tens of hundreds of shorebirds. Remaining 12 months, in a presentation to the Coastal Answers Fellows program on the Cornell Lab, she spoke about her imaginative and prescient for integrating salt manufacturing and shorebird conservation within the Gulf of Fonseca. Salazar’s communicate deeply inspired the management of the CSF program, which budget cross-disciplinary projects in 9 Latin American nations alongside the Pacific Flyway to pilot leading edge science-based tasks that get advantages shorebirds and human communities.

“Coastal Answers tasks wish to be offering answers to enforce efficient conservation methods which are according to the participation of various disciplines and sectors, particularly native communities and stakeholders, and will have to come with governance mechanisms, reminiscent of new public insurance policies, to ensure the good fortune of those projects in the long run,” says Osvel Hinojosa-Huerta, the CSF director. “Julia’s venture excelled at overlaying all of the ones necessities.”

Salazar used to be selected as a Coastal Answers Fellow to release a shorebird conservation initiative that promotes the issuance of environmental licenses for salt farms, the improvement of different earnings streams for salt manufacturers, and the birthday celebration of native, artisanal salt traditions to place San Lorenzo Bay as a vacationer vacation spot. Along with her CSF venture, she is now running with 78 different salt manufacturers within the bay (a few quarter of whom are girls) to assist them reflect the good fortune at her circle of relatives’s salinera, turning birdwatching tourism into an extra, sustainable income. (Learn concerning the good fortune of a separate salt-and-shorebirds venture going down in Guatemala.)

As together with her father, Salazar’s paintings with different farmers within the bay starts with explaining that shorebirds don’t seem to be a danger to salt high quality or shrimp manufacturing. To the contrary, they’re bioindicators of marine-coastal ecosystem well being. Salazar says she assures locals that shorebirds generally don’t devour shrimp, however want small worms, mollusks, and crustaceans that are living underground. And because of the hemispheric migrations of a few shorebird species, from Alaska all of the method to Chile and Argentina, the birds act as a hyperlink between far away ecosystems—their defecation doesn’t break the salt, however somewhat circulates vitamins and makes ecosystems extra productive.

The locals say that Salazar’s outreach has opened numerous eyes concerning the wealthy herbal useful resource of shorebirds in San Lorenzo Bay.

“Julia Salazar got here to show us the real significance of migratory birds within the surroundings,” says Marcio Molina, a salt manufacturer within the bay since 1982. “I imagine that all the salt manufacturing sector used to be completely unaware of those birds, and now now we have begun to price what it method to deal with them and reinforce them after they go via.”

“After Julia introduced us this information, I started to prevent and have a look at the birds, differentiate them, and notice their shapes and hues,” says Delia Hernandez, every other of the San Lorenzo salt manufacturers. “That has helped me remember that now and again we in reality don’t price what now we have as a result of we all know not anything about it.”

In the long run, Salazar sees the combination of shorebirds into salt manufacturing as a possible method to make stronger salt product certifications, thus boosting costs. She says it’s a method to incentivize salt farmers towards ecosystem coverage, and clear of farm enlargement into secure spaces.

“Increasing land doesn’t invariably equate to larger earnings,” she says.

As she continues to recruit the salt manufacturers as allies of conservation, Salazar and different companions in Sal Para L. a. Conservacion put on T-shirts decorated with a Black-necked Stilt—an emblem of the union between shorebirds and all herbal lifetime of San Lorenzo Bay, and of the ancient and cultural legacy of artisanal salt manufacturing.

And to at the moment, Salazar continues to stroll her circle of relatives’s salinera and watch the stilts, checking in on their nests.

“After such a lot of years, it’s nonetheless attention-grabbing each and every time,” she says. “It nonetheless appears like a brand new journey.

“They’re like previous pals you might be glad to peer once more. I will be able to’t believe the salt farm with out them.”