Project Profiles - Guatemala

Savoring Conservation
by Neal Eichholz, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission

As a wildlife biologist, artist, and bird watcher, one of my passions is wild turkeys. I saw my first ocellated turkey in a Florida zoo and thought it was one of the world's most beautiful birds. I dreamed of seeing one in the wild someday. Almost 40 years later, that dream came true when I recently joined long-time friend and colleague, Dr. Lovett Williams, Jr., on a trip to Central America to investigate ocellated turkey behavior. Dr. Williams is an authority on the North American wild turkey and a private consultant currently involved with a conservation program in Guatemala designed to protect and manage these regal birds.

Ocellated turkeys occur in Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Commonly known as the "Yucatan turkey," this species is as delicious as it is beautiful and is a prized food of native people. Subsistence hunting and human encroachment, however, are taking a toll on this bird—especially in Guatemala. Located within the 7,000-square-mile Maya Biosphere Reserve in northern Guatemala is the small village of Uaxactun, where villagers have been granted a government concession to harvest the resources of the protected rainforest. The concession allows them to subsist in the forest, taking turkeys and other game animals for food. Such unregulated, steadily increasing, subsistence hunting could quickly deplete the region's wildlife population. If this practice was replaced by regulated hunting, then ocellated turkeys would thrive.

Building on this idea, Dr. Williams is working with Roan McNab and Erick Baur of the Wildlife Conservation Society in Flores, Guatemala, to implement a hunting management and conservation program in Uaxactun in partnership with the villagers. In this program, approved by Guatemala's National Protected Areas Commission, villagers serve as guides and cooks for hunters from the United States who pay substantial fees for the opportunity to hunt with them. Villagers also help with pre- and post-hunt turkey surveys. Allowing recreational hunting could help forestall more destructive economic alternatives, including oil drilling and timber extraction.

This conservation program is guided by the successful strategy used in the recovery of the North American wild turkey. In the United States, wildlife professionals found that taking only male turkeys, or toms, had no adverse effect on the population. This strategy, combined with laws enacted to protect hens, has helped boost the current turkey population to an estimated 5 million birds.

In April 2001, eight U.S. hunters successfully completed the first legal, tom-only ocellated turkey hunt in Guatemala. Revenue from hunting fees was divided among the villagers, and a new conservation program was off and running. Surveys conducted of singing toms before and after the hunt indicated that adequate numbers of them remained in the hunting area.

Conservation methods like those initiated by Dr. Williams and the Wildlife Conservation Society are a significant step in demonstrating how forest resources can be harvested on a sustainable basis. Five million North American wild turkeys can't be wrong.

For more information, contact Neal Eichholz, Biological Administrator, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, 663 Plantation Road, Perry, Florida 32348, (850) 838-1306, eichhon@fwc.state.fl.us, or Dr. Lovett Williams, Jr., Private Wildlife Consultant, P.O. Box 870, Cedar Key, Florida 32625, (352) 543-9530.