Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 6, 1990 TAG: 9004061097
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A8 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The Tambo Pata-Candamo Reserve in a remote, nearly uninhabited Amazon valley has among the highest numbers of rare and exotic birds and animals of any area in the world, said Charles Munn, an ornithologist with Wildlife Conservation International in New York.
Set aside as a reserve, the park could help promote "ecotourism" as a means for Third World nations to profit from their wilderness areas without destroying them, Munn said.
Before being declared a park Feb. 17, the area covered by the 3.7-million-acre reserve had been drawing about 9,000 tourists a year, generating $2 million annually for Peru.
"This area can be self-sustaining immediately if they enact a gate fee of even $5 a day per visitor," Munn said. "This is unusual. It could simply live off of gate receipts."
About one out of every eight species of birds in the world is found in Tambo Pata, Munn said in an interview Tuesday.
"In three square miles of southeastern Peru, you can see 560 species, which is a world record," he said. "You can see 330 in one day. Which is not bad."
All of Canada and the United States have only about 830 species.
Among the Peruvian birds are eight species of brightly colored macaws, the world's largest and most endangered parrots. They congregate in great wildlife spectacles around "macaw licks," where they eat clay to help digest their food.
The reserve is also home to the endangered, 6-foot-long giant otter, which travels in family packs and eats anacondas, among other delicacies. The park has "white-water rafting that will knock your socks off," Munn said.
Peru announced last month the establishment of a 1-million-acre reserve, Kugapakori-Nahua Indian Reserve, to protect the Kugapakori and Nahua Indians, who remain out of contact with civilization, Munn said.
"If you go in there, they kill you," said Munn. "So you don't go in there."
The two new reserves are near the Manu Biosphere Reserve, an even larger park roughly the size of Massachusetts.
This area of Peru is not among those affected by guerrilla and cocaine trafficking violence, Munn said. "I take my family down with me, including two young children," he said.
"Peru has a fantastic system of parks and reserves on paper," said Adrian Forsyth, a tropical ecologist with Conservation International in Washington, D.C. "If they can just get the support needed to have them operate, I think conservation in Peru will be in pretty good shape."
The Tambo Pata-Candamo Reserve, located north of the city of Puerto Maldonado, about 500 miles southeast of Lima, covers a varied landscape in the Andes foothills ranging from lowland tropical rain forest to mist-shrouded cloud forest at elevations up to 10,000 feet.
Besides its spectacular bird population, it contains half again as many trees as any other region in the Amazon, Munn said. And it is virtually untouched.
"The important thing is there are basically no people living in this entire area," said Munn.
by CNB