The Resplendent Quetzal: Tourism and Land Use in Costa Rica – with Dr. Alan Poole

This joint program, co-sponsored by Brooks Memorial Library and Southeastern Vermont Audubon Society (SVAS), provides an accessible, well-illustrated look at the life history of the Resplendent Quetzal — a dazzling, legendary bird of the highland forests of Central America. Aztec and Mayan cultures revered this quetzal, and today’s bird-watchers, thousands of whom visit quetzal forests each year, are only slightly less in awe.

Dr. Alan Poole, the author of a recently published book on Resplendent Quetzals (Cornell Univ. Press, 2023), will describe through the nesting ecology of this bird, its role in Mayan and Aztec religions, and how it fits into the increasingly threatened cloud forests that sustain it. The talk will also take a look at what lies ahead for this (and other) quetzals — how conservation efforts are giving them a boost, and what threats Mesoamerican cloud forests are facing.

Above all this talk will examine land use in Central America, especially Costa Rica, through a quetzal lens — no species does more to bring current land use trends in this region into focus. Understanding these trends is key to maintaining the viability of highland tropical forests in the Americas, and the quetzals that depend on them.

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ALAN POOLE, an Associate of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, was editor of the Birds of North America life history series (18 volumes, 18,000 pages) for 22 years. He lives along the coast of southeastern Massachusetts, and spends winters in the highlands of Costa Rica, where quetzals are a highlight.

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Note: This program will be at 7PM on Tuesday, May 20 in the Main Reading Room, and will take place instead of the monthly SVAS meeting.