Janet Ruth (PIF Coordinator for USGS)

Janet has been a key contributor to PIF since its inception in 1990.  Few other individuals have attended national PIF meetings, workshops, and conferences and chaired various committees and working groups essentially without fail over the entire existence of the initiative.  Early on, Janet was assigned by U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to be their designated agency representative to PIF – a clear indication of USGS’s view of her ability to contribute and provide a critical link back to USGS.

Janet has not only routinely offered ideas on all aspects of PIF, she currently serves as the Chair of the Research Working Group.  She initiated and has been the driving force behind the PIF Research Needs database.  This database contains information, mined from the many PIF bird conservation plans, on bird conservation research needs of every type.  As such, it provides a key source of information to academia, USGS , US Forest Service Research, and other entities working in scientific ornithology.  Janet also contributes directly to grassland bird conservation through her own research and by organizing workshops and symposia on this topic.

Janet has also been absolutely essential for the PIF website.  She arranged to have USGS host the site and to commit people and resources to keeping it up to date.  Janet does not simply collect information to be served, she continually thinks of the types of information that should be added to the site to make it a truly useful and current source of information.  This has entailed contributing a great deal of personal time in the redesign and maintenance of the website. 

Janet has also provided significant leadership through her long-term participation in national committee meetings and workshops.  Her level of knowledge, experience, and perspective becomes increasingly important as the years go by and as people in the partnership turn over.  It is people like Janet who contribute for the long haul with both energy and ideas, that make a successful partnership.

Through her work to make the website ever more useful, her linking USGS and PIF, her leadership in research needs, and her long-term participation on the Implementation Committee, The Partners in Flight Awards Committee has recognized Janet’s contributions with a 2006 National Leadership Award. 

Asociación Ecosistemas Andinos (ECOAN)

Partners in Flight is pleased to provide a Leadership Award to Asociación Ecosistemas Andinos  (http://www.ecoanperu.org/) for leading the conservation of threatened and neotropical migratory birds in Peru through community-based activities, creation and/or management of  private and public conservation areas, and applied research and monitoring.

ECOAN started in 2000 as a modest grass-roots effort aimed at preventing the extinction in southern Peru of extremely imperiled bird species.  The three main regions for ECOAN’s work include indigenous lands in the Vulcanite Cordillera, close to Cuzco City; the new Abra Patricia Private Conservation Area and Alto Mayo Protected Forest, in Northern Peru; and the ‘Marañon-Alto Mayo Birds Conservation Corridor’, a corridor from Central to Northern Peru of nearly 2.5 million hectares.

Focal species for ECOAN’s work include the very rare Royal Cinclodes, Ash-breasted Tit-tyrant and White-browed Tit-spinetail.  These bird species are totally dependant on the rare and declining Polylepis forests, severely threatened by human activities. Aware that these forests were located on indigenous lands, ECOAN developed a community process aimed at preventing forest destruction and bird extinction by providing short term alternatives for raw materials and energy needs, developing multi-use plantations for midterm use, implementing Polylepis forest restoration with and by the communities, solving land tenure controversies among communities and public agencies, developing bird population and forest conservation monitoring with community members, developing a bird conservation awareness campaign through public workshops and public radio broadcasting, and documenting their activities with scientifically accepted protocols.  ECOAN’s work on Polylepis birds became so successful that it went from 3 initial communities with forests, to 19 communities for a total of 1,500 families. Polylepis destruction in this area has been almost totally halted.  Moreover, the five highest conservation priority communities have agreed to set aside a significant portion of their lands for bird conservation. 

During the past two years, ECOAN has also focused on the conservation of some of the rarest and more imperiled birds of the hemisphere.  Among them, we have Marvelous Spatulatail, Ochre-fronted Antpitta, Long-whiskered Owlet, Johnson’s Tody-tyrant, Lake Junin Grebe and Lake Junin rail.  The Spatulatail is being conserved in a private reserve developed through the first ever conservation easement with a farmer community in Peru.  ECOAN’s achievements are now broadly recognized internationally and several donors and conservation groups are supporting its efforts or replicating its methodologies, like in north and southeastern Bolivia and more recently in Argentina.  Because of their capacity to deliver conservation, ECOAN has become an important bird conservation leader.

The president of ECOAN, Constantino Aucca Chutas, traveled to Portland to receive this award in person during the USFWS Director’s Reception and to participate in some other meetings.   His travel was supported by the American Bird Conservancy.

Operation Migration

Since 2001, Operation Migration (http://operationmigration.org/index.html) has been leading young-of-the-year Whooping Cranes from Central Wisconsin to the Gulf coast of Florida behind ultralight aircraft to establish a discrete, migratory population of these Federally endangered birds.  This new flock will augment the only naturally occurring population that migrates between northern Canada and the southern United States .  Whooping cranes, like a number of avian species, learn to migrate by following their parents along an ancestral route.  Operation Migration pilots act as surrogates during birds’ first season, leading juvenile birds to their wintering grounds.  Migration covers over 1200 miles through 7 states and can take as long as 70 days to complete.  

Since beginning the Whooping crane reintroduction in 2001, seventy-two birds have been taught the migration route and over 80% still survive. One hundred percent of these birds migrate unassisted and 87% return to the core reintroduction site in central Wisconsin .  With this year’s class of 18 birds, there will be nearly 80 birds in this migratory flock, well over half way to the goal of 125 individuals. This year, for the first time, a wild chick was hatched, fledged and successfully migrated following his captive reared parents to Florida .  This is the first wild, migratory Whooping crane hatched in the US in well over 100 years.

This reintroduction has become a very high profile project generating over 500 media stories annually.  This project has been referred to as “the wildlife equivalent of putting a man on the moon.”  One of the Operation Migration aircraft will go on permanent display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in 2007.