Photos: Provita
We’re very happy to share some good news from the Macanao Peninsula in Venezuela, where our most recent donation of 6 binoculars arrived some weeks ago. The recipient of the donation is Provita, a non-profit Civil Society Organization founded in 1987 in Venezuela, dedicated to develop innovative socio-environmental solutions to conserve nature. This is done through research projects on the state of and threats to the country’s biodiversity, educational initiatives to address conservation issues in partnership with local communities, and concrete conservation projects that work directly to conserve species and ecosystems.
The donated binoculars will be mostly used by the “Cielo Verde” (Green Sky) project, a behavioral change campaign that aims to reduce the demand for endangered wild birds in Venezuela, with the Yellow-shouldered Amazon (YSA) being one of the focal species. One of the activities developed by “Cielo Verde” is birdwatching with the local community as a way to offer direct encounters with wild YSA, thus providing an alternative to enjoy them without the need to keep them as pets. For the remaining of 2023, Provita aims to organize a monthly birdwatching outing, involving at least 350 participants. The donated binoculars will allow for more people to join and learn a different way to interact with the magnificent YSA and enjoy nature, and to establish a continuous birdwatching program for the public schools in the area. In the words of Daniela Pineda, lead of the campaign, “each time we hand a pair of binoculars to a community member, we can see the excitement and gratitude reflected in their faces. These binoculars have brought nature closer to those who didn’t have the opportunity to experience it in this way before, and have sparked a greater interest and care for our birds and the environment”. In addition, the binoculars will be used to conduct population surveys of the YSA and generate the scientific data needed to support future research and conservation strategies of the species.
As always, we extend Provita’s, the “Cielo Verde” team’s, and the benefited communities’ gratitude to the donors that made this possible, and encourage more people to support our work through the donation of optical devices or of money to cover the shipping of the donations. More information about Provita’s work and the “Cielo Verde” campaign can be found on their website, Facebook and Instagram profiles.