News That Stays News

The big picture, or why rice makes horses eat my caterpillars August 15, 2016

I am now ensconced in my hotel and, I hope, sufficiently caffeinated to write this. (I only got five hours of sleep last night, or strictly speaking, this morning.) So the first proviso: I’m pretty tired right now. The second proviso is that the story I’m going to tell you is, like most stories, probably partially wrong. It’s what I’ve pieced together from conversations with people at Palo Verde over the last five years and my own observations. I haven’t been able to find written sources for anything but the most basic facts, sometimes because I haven’t had the time and sometimes because they definitely do not exist (yet). You have been warned.

Palo Verde is located in the province of Guanacaste, which is extensively agricultural and has been since the 17^th or 18^th centuries. There is cattle ranching in the drier areas and rice farming in the wetter areas. The ranching resulted in the conversion of lots of tropical dry forest into pasture. One of the reasons Palo Verde was made into a national park in 1978 was because it still had dry forest, although even a lot of that is secondary forest that grew back after being cut down in the past.

Another reason Palo Verde National Park was created was because its wetlands are important for tons of birds. Some live there year-round, some migrate from North America, and some migrate from South America. During the dry season especially, the water is practically carpeted with ducks, herons, egrets, and other birds. These water birds are also the biggest draw for tourists.

In the late 1980s, the Costa Rican government wanted to increase commercial rice production in the area between Palo Verde and the nearby town of Bagaces. They built a system of irrigation canals so that rice could be farmed year-round as a cash crop*. Then they established two brand-new villages and called them Bagatzi** and Falconia.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the population of a native cattail plant exploded at Palo Verde and turned huge areas of the wetlands into dense cattail stands that were bad habitat for the water birds, which prefer open habitats. The best explanation people have come up with for this sudden growth is an increase in available nutrients due to more fertilizer being used in rice farming. To deal with the cattails, the park started an intensive management program which is still in place today.

The program includes cutting the cattails, using huge tractors to smash up the roots, and managed grazing by a herd of cattle. This makes Palo Verde the only national park I’ve ever been to where the biggest animals you are likely to meet are livestock. While the cattle are usually kept in the marsh, they are sometimes driven along the road from one part of the park to another. This means that I occasionally needed to thrash my way a hundred feet into the forest and wait for five or ten minutes while a bunch of cows went by. And yes, they occasionally trampled or ate my plants and/or caterpillars.

But the bigger problem for me was the horses used by the people in charge of the cows (according to the internet, they’re called ganaderos in Costa Rica). When the horses aren’t being used, they’re allowed to graze free. There are a couple of grassy areas where they tend to stay (these are mowed occasionally, so I think they’re essentially impromptu pastures), but they don’t have to stay there. So the horses will wander along the road, chomping the tops off of plants. Since caterpillars often like the tops of plants, there were quite a few casualties. I still haven’t figured out how to analyze these data: I doubt the horses even noticed they were eating caterpillars, and a caterpillar “defending” itself from a horse makes about as much sense as a caterpillar defending itself from a falling tree (or a field biologist).

At any rate, I blame the rice.

*Traditionally, farmers grew only one crop of rice in the wet season. It would be one of many different crops grown for personal use, with little or nothing left over to sell. All this information comes from a Costa Rican researcher studying how land use and ownership have changed in Bagatzi and Falconia since their establishment. This is one case where there isn’t a definitive reference because it hasn’t been written yet.

** If you think this sounds similar to “Bagaces”, you’re right. Bagaces is the hispanicization of “Bagatzi” which was an indigenous name for someone or someplace in the region, although no one I’ve talked to knew what it referred to. The Spanish Wikipedia article on Bagaces references an academic as saying it’s probably from a particular language and probably means the place of the reeds. But the previous sentence in the article says that Bagatzi was the name of a local leader when the Spanish arrived in the 16^th century. Costa Rica does not seem to have done very well at preserving its indigenous cultures, although I don’t know how much was deliberately destroyed. That’s not really the kind of thing you get into in a 150 page gift shop book, which is the only English-language history of Costa Rica I’ve been able to find.

(The History of Costa Rica, by Iván Molina and Steven Palmer, 1998. – I found this through Google Books and I think this is the right book; mine is back in the US and I think I have a revised edition. It was produced by the University of Costa Rica and I assume it’s accurate as far as it goes. But the tagline on the front of the 1998 cover is “Visit beautiful Costa Rica: Visualize its romantic past”. So it’s pretty clear they’d have a vested interest in not getting into things like forced cultural assimilation.)