The chase begins when the rice subject nonetheless seems like a kaleidoscope of molten-silver puddles beneath a pitch-dark sky. Right here in Jamundí, sugarcane fields and rice crops stretch to the horizon, sometimes damaged by stands of bamboo, palm, and kapok timber. Santiago Muñoz Bolaños and Juan David García Uribe, biologists at Icesi College in close by Cali, pull on their gumboots, cowl their faces with neck gaiters
They stride via the mushy dikes, guided by headlamps blazing crimson mild that pulls fewer mosquitoes, and cease on the seize web site. They unfurl the mist nests as darkness provides method to daylight. In order to not spook their targets, they shortly retreat to their workstation: two plastic chairs and a plastic desk beneath a tiny cover tent, which barely retains out the sunshine drizzle that dampens the calls of ibises, Black-necked Stilts, and roosters. Then, they wait. Each 20 minutes, they take turns crossing the slippery dikes in the direction of their nets, hoping to see one chicken tangled within the mesh: the Lesser Yellowlegs.
The slender shorebirds migrate from nesting grounds within the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska to nonbreeding websites in marshes and wetlands stretching from the southern United States to Patagonia. These far-flung migrants are at a possible tipping level, having misplaced greater than 60 % of the species’ inhabitants up to now 50 years—and steep declines up to now decade have been pushed largely by conversion of their nonbreeding grounds to agricultural land.
Yearly since 2022, Audubon researchers have teamed up with native scientists to catch the elusive birds in rice fields of the biologically wealthy Cauca Valley. They’re hoping to know if these managed lands generally is a proxy for the wetlands which have largely disappeared within the area. Within the challenge’s first years, the group connected radio transmitters to 25 yellowlegs and erected seven towers with antennae that detected when tagged birds handed close by. Now, they’re harnessing extra superior expertise to get extra granular particulars in regards to the birds’ whereabouts.
Final November, for the primary time, they outfitted birds with GPS trackers that report location in actual time, from wherever. The detailed information might assist remedy mysteries in regards to the birds’ migration paths, equivalent to whether or not they traverse the ocean in a single lengthy flight or cease on islands alongside the best way. The devices also can present insights essential for conservation within the Valley, like whether or not the yellowlegs return to the identical locations each winter and the way a lot they depend on rice fields, says Gloria Lentijo, Audubon’s director of regenerative agriculture for Latin America and the Caribbean. Understanding the place yellowlegs go is essential to making sure their survival—however getting that information has been no easy process.
Studying to Wait
To tag a chicken, first it’s important to catch it. And Lesser Yellowlegs don’t make it simple. “We’ve provide you with so many methods,” García says.
With most diurnal species, researchers arrange mist nets in an space they know the birds fly via within the early morning. However yellowlegs, with their sharp eyesight, simply dodged the mist nets they arrange on the perimeters of rice fields. The researchers tried altering the quantity and place of nets. No luck. They switched to the lifeless of evening however solely caught bats. They spent weeks hand-sewing nylon strings onto 40 Styrofoam boards to create carpet traps that snared precisely zero birds.
Their most determined plan got here in 2023, when months had handed with no single catch. They’d seen a giant group consuming on a rice subject, however they simply couldn’t get them in hand. So that they devised an elaborate ambush: At nightfall, two folks would crawl, military-style, via a vulture roost caked in droppings towards the birds to scare them, whereas two others closed in from the other way with nets. “On paper, it was an ideal plan. We had been like, ‘Let’s patent this,’” jokes García. The birds flushed precisely as deliberate, headed straight for the web—after which, three ft away, veered off. “And there we had been, with the automotive lights on, as a result of it was already round 7 p.m., in our boxers, bathing in an agricultural canal, washing off the swamp. We found leeches that day,” García says. They ended the second season having caught nothing.
So that they devised an elaborate ambush.
Annoyed, they sought outdoors assist. Farmers advised them that one of the best time to go to is after the harvest, when tractors churn the moist soil and go away it to relaxation. Audubon California colleagues taught them to concentrate on mornings and provided them with decoys, which García and Muñoz hand-painted and now nail into the mud near the web. Throughout their final season, one other colleague knowledgeable them the recording they’d been enjoying over audio system was an alarm name, so the group swapped in a special name that may higher lure the birds.
There’s nonetheless no assure they’ll catch yellowlegs each time, however they see far higher success as of late. Round 7 a.m. on this November morning, undergraduate pupil Esteban Ramos, visiting from Universidad Surcolombiana, comes again from the nets cradling a wriggling burgundy material bag: the primary Lesser Yellowlegs of the outing. The makeshift workstation turns into a well-oiled tagging operation.
River Gates, Audubon’s Pacific shorebird conservation initiative coordinator (and the one who gave them the tip in regards to the alarm name), weighs the chicken: 63 grams, or 2.2 ounces. “How are we going to call you? Not Marranita as a result of there’s no fats on you,” says García, referring to a standard snack of fried plantains and pork. Muñoz measures numerous physique components—beak, head, tarsus, wingspan—whereas García writes all the pieces down. “Since it’s so tough to seize every chicken, we collect as a lot data as attainable within the shortest time attainable, even when we’re not going to make use of it,” Muñoz says. The group attaches a GPS tracker to the chicken’s again, slides black and yellow beads on one leg to point the tagging nation, and locations a silver band engraved with a novel ID on the opposite leg. Then they launch the chicken.
Throughout the outing, the group affixed GPS trackers to 5 birds. The outcomes to date have already redrawn the group’s assumptions of how birds had been utilizing the valley. “After I noticed the tracked data from the GPS tags, it was like a lightweight bulb went off in my head,” mentioned Jorge Velásquez, Audubon’s science director for Latin America and the Caribbean. They’d assumed the birds would focus within the Cauca River and its pure wetlands. After they plotted the situation information, nonetheless, they found the rice fields of Jamundí really had essentially the most chicken exercise. “These maps had been a revelation,” Velásquez says.
Altering the Panorama
The knowledge arrives at a essential second. Regardless of protecting a mere 2 % of the nation’s territory, the Cauca Valley is residence to lots of of the practically 2,000 avian species documented in Colombia. However because the Seventies, the area has misplaced 80 % of its pure wetlands and forests primarily to sugarcane, cattle ranching, and concrete sprawl, inflicting the native extinction of at the least 18 aquatic chicken species within the twentieth century. “This can be a panorama that’s extremely threatened,” says Lentijo.
Because the Seventies, the area has misplaced 80 % of its pure wetlands and forests.
Muñoz and García have seen the speedy shift taking place in entrance of their eyes. They’ve tagged birds on round a dozen rice farms because the challenge began. Not less than one web site is now an house advanced, and one other switched from rice to sugarcane, which is much less labor-intensive and subsequently, extra worthwhile for landowners and farmers. “The pure ecosystem cycle right here is from wetland to rice crops, to sugarcane, to homes,” says a half-joking García.
To handle these threats, 4 years in the past Audubon launched its first working lands program in Latin America right here. The purpose is to advertise bird-friendly practices like habitat restoration and silvopasture throughout greater than 860,000 acres within the Cauca Valley to assist migratory and native species. “The Cauca Valley is a laboratory to check approaches,” Lentijo says.
As a part of the hassle, Audubon, the conservation group Calidris, and Icesi College partnered with the Arrocera La Esmeralda-Arroz Blanquita rice mill—which had already carried out a sugarcane-rice rotation pilot program—to review the potential of this method for waterbird conservation. After six or seven harvests, sugarcane yields steeply decline, so growers have to take away the vegetation and begin over. That’s when Blanquita is available in and suggests planting rice for one or two cycles, creating momentary wetlands that birds can use for stopovers or winter houses. Flooding the fields additionally kills potential pests and permits soil to relaxation, whereas fast-growing rice crops supply producers a fast money injection. Pilot research have proven the mannequin can enhance farm productiveness by at the least 20 %.
To date, farms have enrolled a mixed 2,500 acres within the crop rotation pilot, however not all farmers be part of yearly. If sugarcane costs are excessive, fewer producers enroll, Lentijo explains. Increasing the variety of collaborating farms has additionally been a gradual course of. Right here, the sugarcane trade is extremely mechanized and risk-averse. “They wish to make choices based mostly on scientific information,” Lentijo says.
But momentum is constructing. Audubon, Calidris, and Cenicaña, the sugarcane trade’s analysis heart, collaborated on a playbook offering suggestions for sugarcane farmers to assist birds. They’re hoping to create “demonstration farms” the place farmers will implement the playbook’s bird-friendly practices to share data and research impacts.
In the meantime, the info from the Lesser Yellowlegs tagging challenge additionally helps inform the teams’ outreach. “We now have far more convincing information to knock on farmers’ doorways and say, ‘Hey, these locations are necessary to birds; let’s work collectively,’” Velásquez says. Safeguarding these nonbreeding grounds provides the birds a greater probability to thrive not simply on this valley however throughout the hemisphere, eradicating one of many many obstacles the species faces all through its lengthy migration.
A couple of 12 months in the past, Muñoz bought a tattoo of a Lesser Yellowlegs on his proper arm. If these birds have taught him something, Muñoz mentioned, it’s the means to maintain discovering a means via a panorama that retains shifting beneath you. “We now see issues as an opportunity to discover a answer,” he mentioned. “You simply must attempt to discover it.”
This story initially ran within the Summer time 2026 challenge as “To Catch a Yellowlegs.” To obtain our print journal, develop into a member by making a donation today.
